Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11 | Hacker News Reader

Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11

neowin.net

543 pointsthibautg654 comments

Microsoft did a tremendous amount of hard work to convince me to make the effort to migrate away from Windows at home and at work. They want to lease me a word processor. They want to put ads in my digital filing cabinet. They want to take 30% of my software revenue, and when they realized they couldn't have it, they said they'd settle for 12%. No dice.

There are zero Windows machines in my home or in my business right now. In fact, there are no Microsoft products. I migrate clients away from Windows when possible, and refuse to work with those who are tightly integrated with MS products. I do occasionally work a job where something has to work on Windows or with MS SQL, but I only accept if that can be done in a platform agnostic way.

I previously held onto Windows at home because despite my age I still love games. At least, I love the idea of them, if I ever get time to play.

Now, recently I had a startling realization: it's actually easier now to get many of the games I love running on Wine (with or without steam) than it is on Windows. The performance is great. (edit: I love you, Lutris, you make gaming easy.)

Even for tools where Windows is essentially mandatory (music production), the situation is such that I now would rather run old software on an old version of Windows as a dedicated DAW machine than to subject myself to new Windows.

Anyway, great job Microsoft, you converted a customer into someone who will take time out of their day to bad-mouth you on the internet.

All that could have been avoided by just not behaving like an asshole.

> refuse to work with those who are tightly integrated with MS products

And nothing of value was lost

It's not just spiteful, it's practical.

If I tie my skills, products, and services to Microsoft, and they discontinue whatever I relied on, then my investment stops being valuable; worse, the skills I built are no longer useful, and my human capital diminishes. If I build skills and products that aren't tightly tied to some other company, then my future is more certain.

If I don't invest in Microsoft, they can't pull the rug out from under me, and they can't change the terms on me. They might not be as unreliable as Google, but they're not exactly a charity.

I can and should insulate myself and my business against corporate bullying.

I doubt Microsoft cares that you migrated away.

Not only do they not care, they don't know I exist. That doesn't mean I have to tolerate their behavior.

Their empire crumbles anyway, that's why they're doing this to Windows, because they know the future is (sadly) on the web, and the OS is less relevant than the browser now, and more replaceable than it was 20 years ago.

No one said you had to tolerate it lol. They just said it's not really relevant to the discussion. Microsoft's empire is not crumbling.

Well, the existence of Google Docs in the office, of Chromebooks in schools, of AWS controlling a large share of what MS lusts after, etc indicate to me that perhaps they aren't destined to remained the dominant force they once were, similar to IBM.

Now, I know Microsoft is a near-2-trillion-dollar company, but they would not be the first company to have realized the folly of resting on their laurels.

Microsoft's future over the 20 year term doesn't look as rosy as it could. They'll remain a huge company, but perhaps they'll slip back into the hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars segment instead of the trillion-dollar-titan segment if the investments they're making don't pay off.

They'll have huge income for decades because it's costly and time-consuming to move away from existing systems, but for new companies, Microsoft is no longer a given.

Microsoft is not sliding into irrelevance, they have been growing quite significantly precisely because they have not been resting. Azure is their primary focus, and it's now on the verge of becoming the largest cloud provider.

How many of the top 500 supercomputers run windows?

They care.

Or smartphones, or servers on the internet, or IoT devices, or car head units, or the computers that are put into the hands of every school age kid nowadays.

No, but pissing off people who love computers the most is a terrible idea.

The Windows 98-7 era made me like the system and aspire to be a developer for it. I remember wanting to make my own window!

Now it is simply a hostile wasteland that I regard with suspicion and resentment. There is no love for it left. I now use Linux and bear with OSX when I need to. Windows 8, but especially 10, made a hardcore Unix freak out of me.

Microsoft can't put a quarterly cost on it, but over time losing people who care will cost them everything.

> pissing off people who love computers the most is a terrible idea.

back when balmer jumped up and down in a presentation yelling "developers, developers, developers", they were still good (despite balmer's terrible leadership).

I think they're just losing the battle for mindshare now. Users would more easily move to macs, if they're a casual consumer of tech, and linux if they're more hardcore. Windows has no raison d'etre except for the gaming space imho, and i would hope that the steam deck propels WINE and linux onto gaming and remove the final hold from windows.

Mindshare and count of installed devices is now the phone. MS lost the phone battle a few years ago.

> back when balmer jumped up and down in a presentation yelling "developers, developers, developers", they were still good (despite balmer's terrible leadership).

My memory is probably faulty so corrections welcome, but wasn't "developers, developers, developers" a while before he became CEO?

When you start listening only to marketers/accounting and ignoring your engineers and users, you will eventually fail.

Apple III vs Apple II mindset.

I don't know man. Half the developers I know are now using a Microsoft tool to write code (more among web developers). Nearly everyone is using a Microsoft site to host their code, or relies on code hosted there. WSL and the new terminal have removed a couple of major roadblocks to using Windows for development, and Azure is doing gangbusters. Office is cross-platform and still ubiquitous in the corporate world and isn't going anywhere as long as they have active directory and all the other corporate management tools. They may be losing consumer mind share, but I don't think they really care that much. At this point consumer Windows is only valuable to them as a marketing platform so there's no point in retaining it if they don't use it as such.

That seems right. “Processes” (which includes LinkedIn and Office) and “intelligent cloud” are the largest part of their operating income.[1] “More personal computing” (which includes Windows) was less than a third, only 27%, of their total last year:

  (In millions, except percentages) 2021  2020 Percentage Change
  Processes $ 24,351  $ 18,724 30%
  Intelligent Cloud 26,126  18,324 43%
  More Personal Computing 19,439  15,911 22%
  Total $ 69,916  $ 52,959 32%

VS Code, GitHub, LinkedIn, and their pervasive telemetry are definitely part of a broader strategy.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar21/index.html

>Windows has no raison d'etre except for the gaming space imho

Enterprise.

Either cloud with Office 365 + Azure AD + Intune to get Office/Teams/Sharepoint/Onedrive echosystem and manage clients PC settings and updates over Intune.

Or do it on-prem with Windows server, AD domain, Group policy, Fileshare server and all that. Some enterprise software that is not a SaaS may still require this.

Fair enough, but this implies that this use case is for a business context, in a business environment. All my comments are only applicable to the home/personal use context.

I don't care what spyware/crapware microsoft chooses to add to the enterprise setting.

Drip... drip... drip...

What DAW are you using that is Windows-only?

Ah yes, you can also use Mac for most.

I meant, rather, that I don't think any of the Linux audio production stuff is great. Reaper and Waveform are good, Ardour is not yet (in my opinion, it's buggy and requires too much configuration that is not required in other software, but they'll get there).

The big-name software is genuinely better than what is available on Linux and is worth using, and the latency introduced by VMs makes that idea useless, and using Wine for that task is non-trivial.

I'm just a hobbyist though, my job is not music-related. I have used a midi controller as an industrial process controller though :)

Like everything else on Linux though, it'll get better over time. I do screw around with LMMS on linux because it's completely intuitive to me. It works, it's just not as complex and feature-complete as Ableton / etc.

Bitwig is available on Linux now and works great in my experience. I actually prefer it to Ableton anyway.

What about VSTs? They won't all work on Linux.

Quite a list here of Linux compatible VST/VSTi, some paid, some FOSS : http://linux-sound.org/linux-vst-plugins.html

Next to some awesome open source VSTs (SurgeXT, Helm, Vital etc.) there's plenty of closed source VSTs that run native on Linux (u-he plugins come to mind)

But you could also use something like yabridge [0] in order to run Windows-only VSTs.

0: https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge

Many work 100% a few may have cosmetic quirks on their UI but remain usable, a few don't work at all, but those are a small number. Take a look at Yabridge, as suggested by another user, it's great. A nice aspect of running plugins under Yabridge/WINE is that you can run obsolete plugins that wouldn't load anymore on modern Windows versions, so there's no planned obsolescence that would stop you from using that beloved synth or effect that was never upgraded for example beyond Windows XP. The only problem I encountered with some among really old plugins, and I mean from well over 20 years ago, is that the installer stops as it detects a negative amount of storage available, which is very likely the result of trying to fit a bigger variable carrying the number of bytes free of modern filesystems structures into the smaller one that old code can read. I believe the error could be prevented through a quick & dirty kludge by implementing a WINE executable option that fakes the free storage the installer sees just temporarily until the end of the install procedure.

One of the reasons I like Bitwig is that the included instruments are really good and you can use the grid to build just about anything. So I find myself reaching for third party instruments much less.

Hopefully this new CLAP plugin format takes off though.

I thought I had tried all the linux DAWs, but I haven't tried Bitwig; thanks for mentioning it, I'll try it out this week.

Just a heads-up: Make sure to have enough time to mess around with it because it's a massive time drain. Especially if you like sound design. Exciting and fun time drain, but a time drain none the less.

I bought a midi controller to make music for a game I'm working on part-time, knowing absolutely nothing at all about music.

It is the most relaxing, pleasant time-sink I have encountered in years, I wish someone had told me the joy of music creation earlier. Even just fiddling with the piano is quite extraordinarily relaxing.

Ah, I remember the joys of discovering music production and the exploration of the audio multiverse. What I wouldn't give to be in your shoes right now :)

I also unfortunately remember trying to RTFM incomplete / incorrect docs and trying to hunt down some obscure forums in search for some nuggets of knowledge. Oh, and YT wasn't quite a thing it is today, so watching potato resolution YT videos (if any) was the norm.

Luckily that's much less the case these days, so you're starting at a massive advantage if you want to learn. In that regard, someone in the BWS community some time ago shared a list of tutorials for people starting out: https://markdownpastebin.com/?id=7515a658a4ec4aee9f40910485a...

That should get you going nicely :)

Thanks! The problem nowadays is sorting the wheat from the chaff, there's so much stuff on the internet, it's hard to find "the best" material instead of lazy SEO stuff. The list will help, thanks again.

Second the Bitwig, with a caveat: Read the Manual or Suffer. There are a alot of absolutely non-obvious UI rakes you can step on, can be really off-putting if messing around blindly (from the top of my head: if you accidenly turn on clip player for a track, it will not play the timeline; not disabling polyphony will prevent your Note Grid from running continuously; microtonal notes are being sent to MIDI differently depending on the MPE settings ...)

Bitwig + Pianoteq is the ultimate toy to tinker and relax with.

Thanks! I think I'll print that sentence on A2 paper with 72 point font, an tape it on our helpdesk:

Read the Manual or Suffer.

Maybe get someone with a God's Booming Voice to speak it in the phone voice mail message , too.

Ableton is the only thing keeping me on Windows.

Any reason why you don't want to use Bitwig Studio? It's pretty much the same workflow.

Never tried it, maybe one day.

I have a Push 2 as well. I know it's meant to work in Bitwig, but I do love the integration of it with Ableton.

I am similar, except one thing.

I have separate hdd with offline windows 10 installation for gaming. It never gets internet access, never gets updated. Everything totally offline. I dont have a stomache to deal with Wine.

I just use Lutris now and it all works, there's no more screwing around with Wine for me; if you had problems with Wine in the past, I suggest you try Lutris, you might find it is no longer a hassle.

If you use Steam, it's all automatic and transparent in the background, but I don't use Steam for everything.

Are there games you want to play, that won't allow you to start the game if you don't have an active internet connection?

Don't know about him, but if a game requires an internet connection at any point, it's not a game I want to play.

how do you get those games onto the machine if it's offline these days? Unless you exclusively buy off GOG, and download the offline version...

You could look into LTSC, it's about as close to W7 as you can get in terms of user control (e.g. no forced updates) and still enjoy semi-recent Windows features like D3D12 ""Agile SDK"" (lol)

Windows-free Ubuntu guy here, for over a year now. I even kept my old Windows box hooked up to a KVM "just in case". So far it only gets turned on if I accidentally bump my foot on the power switch.

I encapsulated my old windows machine into a VM - it gets fired up to run Quicken and another accounting program for which there are no reasonable client based substitutes. The VM boots fast, I have a "safe" copy of the VM image incase of a viral compromise, and it's out of the way of my normal workflow. Windows machine free for about a decade.

Do you have any pointers to how to do this? I have a dual-boot Win7 machine I would like to have run Windows as a VM in Linux, to keep the proprietary executables I need for work running with a smaller security footprint.

If you have Windows installed on separate hard drive (or partition), you can boot it directly with Qemu in Linux. No need to do anything fancy, just use existing installation. If you have two graphic cards, it is even more fancier with GPU passthrough.

Something here, might not be the best guide: https://superuser.com/questions/342719/how-to-boot-a-physica...

Same here vis a vis Linux for my personal use, but the worse thing from Microsoft's perspective is how it pushed me towards buying Apple and recommending Apple products to everyone I know. As a techie, I used to hate Apple. I can't stand the closed ecosystem, I can't stand the product markups, and whenever friends or family would ask, I'd tell them they could get more powerful systems for a fraction of the cost if they just stuck to Windows. Nowadays I do the exact opposite. I tell them that while they'll be paying a markup, it's worth it because Apple has at least trended in the direction of privacy and has also continued delivering on usability. I'm not bombarded by ads and news when I open my Mac. So while I will never get my family and friends to use Linux, I have absolutely caused them to spend tens of thousands of dollars on Apple products instead of Windows. That's where I think these anti-consumer behaviors could really hurt Windows in the long run, if enough techies start driving their social circle to Apple.

That’s been my experience since the early 2000s: people recommend Macs (or especially iPads) for the people who will be calling them for support, and it’s generally delivered well.

One thing I will note is that the markups have been a lot less in practice than claimed since Apple stopped using PowerPC. Most of the people I know who did comparisons ended up finding the Mac either equivalent or, frequently, cheaper once they adjusted for equivalent quality. Sure, you can buy a $400 PC but you end up buying 3 of them over the same service life and have a shoddy display for that entire time. The bundled crapware PC vendors use to subsidize the low-end stuff is really not helping the impression of their products, either (I know multiple people who had an unusable system out of the box that way. They now use Macs.).

The markup is in the RAM/storage upgrades. Your stuck with Apple's prices at time of purchase for the most part and if you need it fast then you have to go some way more expensive SKU to get it. Only the Mac Pro (which is already insanely expensive) and the Intel Mac Mini (where you can only upgrade the RAM) are user expandable. And who knows if the Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be.

The mistake is buying a $400 laptop. Although anecdotically I've known a lot more people whose MacBook has died than PC laptops.

Just a small quibble — the intel Mac mini dropped upgradeable ram in 2014, with one of the worst apple product refreshes ever. The 2014 Mac mini was worse than the 2012 in almost every way — my theory is some engineer realized they could save money by essentially slapping a MBA logic board in the Mac mini, and that’s what happened.

27 inch iMacs had easily accessible ram upgrades until they were discontinued. 21.5 iMacs (post 2012 refresh) did also have upgradeable ram, but it was a pain to do (dimm slots were on the back of the main logic board, meaning you essentially had to remove every other component and the logic board).

2012-2015 MBP Retinas could have the storage upgraded because it was a discrete SSD. I think they were largely proprietary or specially made, but they could be upgraded.

MBAs up until 2017 could also have the storage upgraded.

I wish that ram was upgradeable on apple silicon systems, but I understand why it’s not (I assume it’s an integral part of the SoC).

Those features are annoying, I agree, but they're also a checkbox away from being disabled. Less time than it took you to write this rant.

I'm really getting to the point that I think we need regulation that bans mandatory advertising features in any product which you outlay cash for directly, or at least requires a realistically priced non-advertising version to be made available (i.e. give some leeway to go "nah, it's not 10,000% more expensive to sell the version with ads...)

It seems like the inevitable destination of all products is to be chock full of tracking and ads, because if you have a large market share, why not also monetize it further by selling ads to your disposable-income identified customers?

For music production you should check out Bitwig. It's awesome and competitive with other mainstream DAWs.

Don't worry, a bunch of Microsoft VPs got promoted for showing that this would boost revenue (and, unless MS experiences a serious exodus due to this latest round of shenanigans, such increa$es will materialize).

So, yes, there certainly are MS folks who (unironically) think that they did a "great job" with this.

I think the exodus thing doesn't work the way you think. Sane people leave, and the staff is left with people who want to be there and to be pulling all these stunts, spinning them as success.

Think they probably meant a user exodus, as that's where the revenue comes from.

You are correct, thank you! I probably could've been clearer about that :)

> Now, recently I had a startling realization: it's actually easier now to get many of the games I love running on Wine (with or without steam) than it is on Windows. The performance is great.

I find this hard to believe unless you are talking about older or indie games.

Almost all Steam games (old and new) run on Linux with no further modifications. I'm running Elden Ring, Dark Souls I Remastered, DS2 SotFS, DS3, GTA V, Sekiro, Valheim, XCOM 2, Hellblade, Noita, BioShock Remastered and Infinite, Celeste, and dozens of others. This is a relatively recent development, and the only "technical" thing I've had to do is tell Steam to run games not verified for Linux with Proton. You don't even need to run Ubuntu; I've been using Arch and NixOS.

Proton is a great piece of tech and gaming on Linux is the best it has ever been but we are far from a world where Windows and Linux are equals at gaming.

When you want a play a specific game it is still the case that it might work on Linux. If the game is on Steam and doesn't have multiplayer you can update the might work to probably will work.

However, the comment I was responding to was claiming that running games on Linux was easier than Windows, which is only the case for old games. Their claim that performance is great is also a bit suspect since most games will perform worse on Linux than Windows but performance is usually "good enough" on Linux so I can see where they are coming from.

Anyways, I agree with the people in this thread saying that gaming on Linux is great and a viable option but (as per usual) people are hyping up Proton and Lutris and Linux to be better than they are. Windows is still by far the best choice if you want to play games on a PC.

I don't know what your sources are, but for me Linux recently took over prime position for gaming. I've been dual-booting since forever, but it's many months between every time I boot up Windows, and every time I'm now reminded that the lead it had is gone except for one thing:

- The performance difference is small enough that I don't notice.

- Audio setup is now easier in Linux (using PulseAudio and, since ~6 months, PipeWire). I had the worst time getting Windows to output to the right place.

- I can't remember the last game which didn't work in Steam on Linux, even if it's not officially supported. They do have a huge incentive to improve Linux support now that their handheld console is running it.

- Windows supports more than 8 bits per colour channel. The setup is annoying and fiddly, and it doesn't always work, but damn does Elden Ring look good in HDR.

I've been using the official AMD/NVIDIA drivers (on both platforms) most of this time. The NVIDIA driver kept crashing things so often I switched, and the AMD driver has been rock solid.

They're squeezing revenue from their large portion of users who are not technologically proficient to realize they're being exploited.

Sounds a bit like Apple.

i haven't used windows since 2008. the writing was already on the wall back then about which direction microsoft was heading.

you see the same thing happening with apple now. they have enough market dominance that they're no longer constrained to advance tech for the consumer, but rather just for themselves (i.e., their head-long dive into content and advertising). this is exactly what antitrust regulators should be heading off at the pass, but they fail time and again (and again and again).

I could not tell you the last time I had Windows in the home. I would guess around 2013. After then I kind of went (almost) 'Full Stallman' - I had been moving that way for a few years already.

The only Microsoft product I have is an old Xbox 360 that was updated once and then left permanently offline.

Side story - I remember in late 2001 when the 1st Xbox was coming out and I was in a retail store. There was couple looking to see what consoles where around and what to choose. The husband saw the Xbox and the Microsoft name on it. "I'm not supporting that thing! They have made my life a living hell, Mark my worlds they will do anything to dominate the market and I do NOT support that!" Seeing how they are trying to still buy their way to success, his words ring true today.

Last time I had a windows machine in my house was 2005.

Even my elderly parents run Linux, supported by me of course. They don't know even know the difference.

Took me a few tries over the years but maybe 5 years ago I tried dual booting Linux yet again and that time it stuck. I found myself leaving it on the Linux side for longer and longer stretches of time. Finally last year someone gave me a hand-me-down laptop and I just didn't bother installing windows.

Everything I do takes place in the shell, an IDE (of which there are tons), or by far the most common, in the browser.

I used Firefox because that's what my distro comes with but I also have Chrome installed for just in case. That turned out not to be an issue with the sites I typically frequent.

Today I had a random person look over my shoulder and ask "what kind of computer is that? Must be really old..."

Grrrrr.

>Today I had a random person look over my shoulder and ask "what kind of computer is that? Must be really old..."

Consider that a badge of honor.

Windows Vista for me

> I previously held onto Windows at home because despite my age I still love games. At least, I love the idea of them, if I ever get time to play.

I used to think this way too. I have been holding on to a Windows 7 machine at home since 2011 but its days are numbered.

Linux has gotten to the point where it just works and clumsy software can be installed and ran in containers. I have a 12 core threadripper with an AMD Radeon Pro running Void Linux Musl and Steam installed via flatpak and most of my games work. I have Debian running an a NUC hooked to my TV and that plays Hulu in a browser or run whatever I want. I don't miss Windows. If I NEED it there are VM's.

I wish performance on Linux was as good as Windows for high end gaming. Sadly it is not.

So, Windows for gaming and Linux for everything else it is.

I literally just yesterday super painstakingly "downgraded" to Win10 because W11 was/is so terrible. I had to take my Win laptop into Bestbuy because of this ridiculous situation in which Windoze was telling me I needed to buy a "legitimate" copy of the stupid operating system and I wasn't able to fix it myself without doing all sorts of stuff involving editing registries and God knows what else. The Best Buy guy was like "yeah, I wouldn't have recommended putting Win 11 on it. I can wipe it and put 10 on if you want", which I gladly accepted. Normally I use Ubuntu, I just bought a Win laptop because it seems easier to print from a Windows computer than a Linux PC, sadly.

I've left Windows for years but still using Microsoft's thing, e.g. vscode and github.

They're platform independent thought.

Last week I allowed it to "upgrade" to Win 11 22H2. Part of the upgrade involved silently resetting a heap of my default apps. When the upgrade was done, Firefox was no longer my default browser, it was changed to Edge. Also, the default apps for PDF, JPG, PNG, TXT, MKV, and probably others that I haven't yet discovered, were set to their MS equivalent apps.

Microsoft, this was not a nice thing to do to a user.

>Firefox was no longer my default browser, it was changed to Edge

I'm wondering how does this happen? I have Chrome as the default browser on my Win11 machine for a year now, and after all the updates, Chrome is still the default. The default apps for PDF, music and video play-back were also kept between updates. Updates never did anything funky for me, just added improvements and new features, which kept me contempt with it.

Really curious why this would happen to you but never happened to me. I have Win11 Pro edition, installed from scratch from the official ISO (not OEM), if that makes any difference. Maye OEM or Home editions behave differently?

People blindly click ok in dialogs ,think it will be fine and thus get their setting changed or install unwanted softwares.

And the dialog that nukes your app default pops up in OOBE of every win 11 major update. (To clarify, I don't think the dialog should be there at first place. A dialog that defaults to give user a big problem is just dumb)

You're extremely lucky then. On our (very large, very strictly managed Windows 10 fleet) Edge is CONSTANTLY becoming the default PDF handler. Its a real PITA and MS has failed to give admins the tools to manage this correctly.

These anti customer dark patterns are going to drive a wedge into the golden goose of corporate sales. At the same place as in my first statement, Macs are slowly showing up in places you'd never have guessed before. Clinics, law offices, regulated environments. IE corporate MS bread and butter. Someone over there needs to get their head out of their corporate ass and see the writing on the wall and turn the ship before it hits the iceberg they're heading at under full steam.

> Someone over there needs to get their head out of their corporate ass and see the writing on the wall and turn the ship before it hits the iceberg they're heading at under full steam

It was probably some manager's KPI at Microsoft to increase Edge market share so he decided that forcing Edge to default everytime would push him ahead and get him that sweet promotion.

Microsoft lacks a common vision for Windows and good leadership. As with the products of any massive corporation, Windows now feels like a product built "by committee", a result from various internal turf wars, where every manager or gang tries to push their agenda to gain visibility inside the org to show something at their next performance review and hopefully get promoted, at the expense of the end-user and the OS being universally hated by consumers and businesses. "So, what did your team achieve last year? Well, I was in charge of putting Candy-Crush and other partner-network ads in the Star Menu, giving us an extra 10 Million USD a year. Great, the investors and bean counters will love the extra revenue. HR will contact you about your promotion. Congrats!"

I think much of Apple's success was Jobs dogfooding every product being developed before giving the final go ahead for shipping. I wish Satya Nadela and other higher ups there would dogfood fresh installs of Windows (not the images provided by their IT department) and see the horrible mess they're shipping to their customers. Then Nadela and those execs should ask themselves, "Would I actually want to spend money on this and have to live with it every day? If not, what could I fix to make it desirable so that others would want to buy it?". This way of consumer first thinking allowed Jobs to make Apple what it is today.

Microsoft needs to put in charge of Windows someone who's in touch with consumers and business to guide this project with an iron fist instead of letting various committees and gangs sneak their own agendas in the end product. But I think Microsoft just doesn't care that much about Windows anymore and is instead focusing on Azure & cloud, OneDrive, Office365, Xbox and buying game studios, etc. so Windows is slowly rotting away unnoticed by those at the helm.

> so Windows is slowly rotting away unnoticed by those at the helm.

I wouldn't call it slowly, but you are right about your assessment. It is already quite some years ago, when evaluating the privacy and security measures of my machine, I had to conclude that MS *is* the adversary. I have a chuckle when people ask me what virus scanner they would need for their Windows machine. It is like asking how to prevent a deadly disease from catching a cold. It's not a hyperbole. All the opt-outs are illegal in the first place, but the damning fact is that MS does not allow you to switch of stealing part of your personal data anyway.

You should not run Windows. If you have to, because some legacy software does not have an alternative (and I find that has become increasingly rare), then run it in a vm with no internet access.

Also, we should really stop the meme about the year of the Linux Desktop. KDE has far surpassed Windows already. I use both OSes and have to conclude Windows is beyond repair. Nobody cares about this sinking ship, and that is a positive end of this rant.

*EDIT* I even think MS thinks the same wrt win in a vm. I can imagine they will ship Linux one time and have win apps open in a legacy win vm.

> Windows now feels like a product built "by committee"

Since Windows 10, it definitely feels more like a Linux distribution than a polished, paid product. A hodgepodge of garbage with differing (and sometimes opposite) UI paradigms, incentives and terrible quality.

This is something we tolerate in the Linux world because it's all done by mostly unpaid random people with different goals, skill levels and opinions, but seeing this from a huge, for-profit company that produces masterpieces such as Windows 7 is ridiculous.

> At the same place as in my first statement, Macs are slowly showing up in places you'd never have guessed before.

I switched to Macs in 2004, and have loved the experience most of the time, but fear that it's not so much that Apple is above this sort of thing as that they're a little bit behind Microsoft in doing it. Already, do you want to use iCloud? Are you sure you don't want to use iCloud? Maybe now you want to use iCloud? And it's relatively easy to ignore, but of countless small such choices is Microsoft-style user hostility made.

I'm aware of the things you're talking about and I also find them annoying. But I just setup a brand new Windows 11 Pro laptop and I had NO idea how bad things had gotten. By default out of the box a brand new Windows Pro install will:

1) Only let you login using a Microsoft account. No local account

2) If secure boot is enabled in the BIOS it will be locked to 'S' mode where it will only install and run software from the MS App store. You can not disable it without logging into the MS Store and downloading and running a tool to disable it. The only way I found around this was to go into the BIOS and disable Secure Boot. That immediately disabled 'S' mode. This was not documented anywhere.

I can only speak for Windows 10, but I have noticed that Windows behaves differently when updating Home and Pro versions. For example: I noticed the Home edition would reinstall removed apps on certain updates, while the Pro edition would not.

I wish antitrust enforcement focused on this stuff again. Remember when MS merely including a web browser at all was brought into question?

Microsoft also used to have 90% market share. It's less impressive now that Mac is a viable competitor and iOS and Android are good enough for 80% of common tasks.

By viable competitor, do you mean OS that I can’t possibly use for work or for proper gaming? Mac isn’t any more viable than Ubuntu, which is why I have an Ubuntu laptop (But a windows desktop, by utter necessity)

(Edit: Actually, when it comes to gaming, Linux is getting better and better)

80% of common tasks isn’t enough when part of the remaining 20% is absolutely necessary for work

I mean, obviously it depends on the work - as if macbooks weren't standard issue at many companies ostensibly doing some kind of work

if your cad software or whatever doesn't work with your OS of choice I'd take it up with the vendor

Can you elaborate? I never had a Mac device before this year, but it can do all the document processing (M$ Office) I need for work/school, almost all audio-related stuff (DAWs and VSTs), and video/photo (ugh I know but Adobe) that I need it to, even though its a brand new chip architecture. It can't do games but I have a M$ desktop just for that and for some rendering stuff

Windows advertising features were bugging me, so I tried to install MacOS on my computer, but Apple told me that I would have to purchase different hardware from them directly if I wanted to run their software.

Seems like MacOS does not run on hardware that is not sold by Apple.

It does; just not out of the box. They only include drivers for their hardware; You have to compile your own kexts. The EULA, however, does “prevent” you from doing such a thing, but unless you’re selling “Hackintoshes”, Apple isn’t going to care.

The age of the Hackintosh is nearing its end though, due to Apple Silicon.

Well we did have PearPC even before they went Intel. I used it a bit to see if I could do everything I needed before I bought a Mac.

It was horribly slow but something more optimized like Rosetta might help.

It'll be a much harder game though for sure.

https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/building-a-customac-h...

I work with numerous companies as a part of my job and get to see a lot of their browser windows via screenshare.

Many are MS-only shops, but a large and growing section are hybrid or in some cases Mac-only.

The rise of cloud (ie, OS-independent) solutions has had it's impact: Windows isn't required for the vast populace (MS still takes it's tax via Office365) of business workers.

The next frontier is Chrome as the overlord of the browser realm.

How much of the Office Suite market do they have though?

If you want to use the Microsoft Office suite, it’s available on the Mac, included in Office365.

> that Mac is a viable competitor

Almost made me spit out my drink

> Remember when MS merely including a web browser at all was brought into question?

The very first MS-DOS also included a text editor - for free! Oh, the humanity! Those evil Redmondians!

I'm curious what the difference is between a free text editor is and a free browser included with the OS. Neither are functions of the operating system. Both have other companies providing such functionality.

I can see two obvious differences.

1) the text editor shipped with the OS is extremely basic. It is not competing to be the world's favourite text editor, and is probably required to have a usable OS out of the box.

2) the web browser was essentially a competing platform to the OS itself for many user tasks. To leverage your monopoly on one platform to control another is against anti trust.

1. EDLIN wasn't much different from the text editor I used on the PDP-10 just a few years earlier. Lots of people used EDLIN and saw no need for another. Also, Netscape was an extremely buggy browser - it crashed all the time. Explorer was far more reliable. It was better.

2. If it was doing essential OS tasks, then it was part of the operating system.

Maybe IE was better for a while. But for a long time it wasn't, and it wasn't allowed to stand by itself. That was the problem. It was the de facto standard, not by being good, but by being pushed via Windows.

I hope we can agree a text editor is different that a browser, word processor, or an IDE (at least nowadays). Nobody complains that Microsoft ships Nodepad or Paint, because they are the bare minimum and avoidable. Hell, they shipped Nodepad and Wordpad, and neither dented Word's market share.

Regarding 2, this is unbelievably naive. For such an important product, of course Microsoft would find a way to make it do "essential" OS tasks. Apple/iOS is obviously much worse in this regard. But for better or worse, iOS devices are a minority in the EU.

What's unbelievable is Microsoft being charged with a crime for giving away free stuff that was significantly better than any other implementation out there.

As if giving consumers free tools was harming them. As if Microsoft ever prevented any other browser from being installed.

Never mind that today nearly every OS comes with a free browser. Even my Kindle comes with one.

> "Regarding 2, this is unbelievably naive. For such an important product, of course Microsoft would find a way to make it do "essential" OS tasks."

The Start Menu in Windows 10/11 is HTML/CSS. It's not a matter of "finding ways" to make it do things, HTML was pushed as being the document description / display technology, why wouldn't Microsoft use it for Explorer folder views and Active Desktop? Why shouldn't they be allowed to? You could embed web pages in the Win98 desktop background, that's the kind of embedded document thing people were researching and crowing about in the 60s and 70s in alternative OS's. It's the kind of thing users wanted with rainmeter and SysInternals' bginfo. IIRC you could edit the CSS and change the theme of Explorer folder views, give them new colours and background images.

> "Nobody complains that Microsoft ships Nodepad or Paint, because they are the bare minimum and avoidable."

Nobody complains that Microsoft shipped the best CSharp compiler csc.exe (before .Net span off into its own thing), and didn't ship or encourage Mono or Xamarin compilers. Or PowerShell and not Perl. Why don't those things attract the interests of the courts? And now they can ship Edge, and that's apparently fine now?

In 2013 they were fined $731m by the EU for, as the BBC put it, failing to promote a range of web browsers. They blamed a 'technical error' then too.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21684329

I think it do ask you whether you want to change the setting, except the default is nuking all your settings.

And something even more annoying is: That pops up in the OOBE of every major update. If you accidentally click "yes", your settings fxxks up. Come on, I already click "no" last time, you shouldn't even ask me again about this.

My favorite part about this "helpful" prompt is that "no" is tiny text at the corner of the screen, and the yes-please-change-all-my-defaults button is a giant "ok".

This kind of behavior should be illegal, IMO.

It's not going to be illegal anytime soon, but in the meantime, you can punish them by moving to Mac, or Chromebook. I did that after an update that went too far

Chromebook is worse. They pioneered the "in order to use this device which we let you pretend to own you must first attach yourself to our borg" model.

If it's got any data protection impacts, it is illegal in Europe under the GDPR. However its enforcement is significantly lacking even against very obvious and blatant breaches, so anything slightly more subtle has no way of being addressed.

At least it says "No" and not "No Thanks" or "Maybe Later" or "Remind Me Later"?

...or as I like to call it whenever I run into one, "where's the 'Fuck Off!' button?"

I don't think it's different with "Maybe later" in anyway if it pops up after every big update. It's absolutely not how "No" should work.

So, what's rehab for Windows users? :)

A Linux install USB?

A steamOS fork?

Never run Windows updates. I've always seen shady behavior with them and they did nothing significant in my case for my system in any way.

I don't use windows at all but it is just giant pit of advertisements targeted towards the very basic computer users

If you don’t use it, how have you seen “shady behavior” or been able to definitively assert that they “do nothing significant”?

I used it briefly in the past 1 year.

So you have like three molecules of experience and you are generalizing?? I am on win 10 n do every single update except upgrading to 11 and I m pretty satisfied

With all due respect, that’s not enough time to be saying anything about it and especially not enough to be telling people not to install updates when that’s the most common way people have their computers breached.

I don’t own a Windows device (and haven’t since Win98) and have had dislikes about it since the early 90s, but I’ve also supported it professionally and would never recommend someone avoid updates. Buy a Mac, perhaps, but until you’re ready to switch you should stay current.

I've used it for work reasons as well, I am not saying it sucks, it's just the troubles I had with updates. They seemed to do nothing in my case. I have always been on Linux desktop since 2015 and now on a Mac. I am not a fan of OSX, I just use mac for the awesome hardware it has.

Then your system is likely wide open to all kinds of known security vulnerabilities.

This is a dangerous mindset, because it shows just how badly Microsoft has squandered trust.

Microsoft used to be the "trust us with your workflow" company. The one that would go out of the way to make sure your badly coded DOS games still worked.

They've gone so far in the other direction-- blowing up user settings and workflows to push whatever KPI-of-the-week they're chasing-- that the trust is gone. People are afraid to accept even necessary security fixes because they no longer trust Microsoft not to break their experience.

Remember when the upgrade script started showing a friendly "all your files are right where you left them?" That's freaking TABLE STAKES. Your customers expect that. You shouldn't have to reassure them of that. It's like saying "our hamburgers don't give you genital warts."

Dogshit advice. Windows updates include security patches. What may happen is this screen where you need to click no/remind me later, and it will not change anything.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/07/windo...

Hey, sorry that happened, it should have preserved all of the default applications, etc. There are multiple suites of tests and processes that exist to try to ensure updates preserve user data and preferences but clearly something went wrong here. I’m just a developer, not a spokesperson, but I want to ensure that this is investigated if possible.

If you file a bug in feedback hub under the Windows Update category it will collect the diagnostics required to fix this issue and prevent it from happening again.

If you also provide a link to the filed feedback to me I’ll be happy to triage it personally as I frequently work with the teams that are responsible for update migration.

Thanks!

> Hey, sorry that happened, it should have preserved all of the default applications, etc.

Thanks for your apology. I can imagine this could happen to some random unknown software team but not to the supposed leader of the desktop. I believe this is honest apology but I am not sure I can trust that the issue was a bug and not a feature.

Same. Windows has done this in the past on updates

I can understand why you might be skeptical. However, I have learned over the years as a developer investigating update issues that the constraints placed upon the update process to ensure compatibility and resiliency are complex.

The nature of the process used for most Feature Updates requires user data and preference migration and transfer. Notably, an entirely new installation of Windows is created and then existing user data and preferences are migrated or transferred as appropriate. There a variety of good reasons for this from a technical standpoint, but it has certain complexity and performance trade offs so is only used for certain types of updates.

Other types of updates use an in-place upgrade methodology that doesn’t require user data and preference migration but has certain characteristics that make it currently less suitable for major feature updates.

Thanks!

However, I have learned over the years as a developer investigating update issues that the constraints placed upon the update process to ensure compatibility and resiliency are complex.

I have learned over the years that constraints and complexity are often abused to force one's way.

Not necessarily even consciously but if the collective train of thought in a company predominantly wants to prefer one outcome (i.e. market share, world domination) at the expense of another outcome (making users happy), then it tends to be that it's really easy to do things that result in the former and really complex and difficult to do things that result in the latter.

I appreciate that when unexpected outcomes occur it's tempting to vent frustrations and say things in a way intended to influence the feelings of others to validate our own frustrations and feelings. However, as a former colleague of mine (Bryan Cantrill) frequently reminds everyone, empathy is a core engineering value:

https://tritondatacenter.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

I completed the second decade of my software development career just a few years ago and it already seems like the third decade is speeding by. The first 17 years were in the *nix world and the last five have been as part of the Windows development team.

There have been many times that I have incorrectly assumed why a particular outcome occurred only to find out later as I suddenly became responsible for that same scenario that they had good reasons for their choices, and it was either the best possible outcome at the time given constraints or very much an unintended one.

In short, I have been extremely fortunate to have a number of mentors during my career that have helped me realize that perspective and empathy are key to understanding the complexities of software development. Through those experiences I have come to believe that software development is just as much a social discipline as a technical one, especially at scale.

Thanks for your kind consideration.

It's crazy what difference a single human voice can make to one's perception of a topic.

Thanks for chiming in :)

It does make a difference but doesn’t change the effect of Microsoft’s bad business decisions. There are no doubt many amazing individuals at the company, but the whole Windows ecosystem is polluted. It has lacked identity for the past decade since cancelling Windows Phone.

Gamifying browsing habits, monetizing MSN celebrity gossip on stock widgets and built-in search capabilities… etc… how are we supposed to be productive with such childish garbage?

Your attitude is about fifteen years out of date. We live in a world where you have to turn off your wifi if you don't want to use a Microsoft account and any option Microsoft doesn't like us using is displayed in a tiny font that's almost the same color as the background. You don't think we can tell when we're being told to go fuck ourselves?

You seem to be responding with pretty thought-through responses, so I thought I'd ask you this: Given some people have mentioned its possible the confusion happened due to a "dark pattern" - i.e. a deceptive UI choice, or one where the concequences of what things do are not labelled in a seemingly deliberately confusing way, what is the thinking behind this at microsoft? Is it something they would consider changing if enough people struggle with it? How do things like this happen - I struggle to imagine that product developers on the windows team use these default apps themselves. Surely there must be internal dissent about such things?

I've been facinated by microsoft in recent years, they are really putting in a jekyll and hyde performance imo. They are consistently great at developer relations in some areas, with things like generous contributions to hackathons, visual studio code, github copilot, visual studio etc. But seem to make decisions in other areas, in my opinion particularly around the OS team, that needlessly antagonize a lot of people.

If I were living in a place where they had offices, working for MS is something I might consider one day, if only to be able to contribute to such important things that so many people use daily but I feel like I bounce back and forth on this opinion when such confusing decisions come out with seeming silence from microsoft's end.

Yeah considering the absolute pissbaby tantrum Windows 10/11 throws when you go to change the default browser in the first place there's effectively no difference.

I just reinstalled Win10 at home. I used Edge -> Bing -> "chrome" and the top "result" is a blurb saying something like "Hey you don't need to use Chrome when you could use Edge!"

I laughed out loud - actually. "Pass the butter Edge...."

Sibling comments indicate that the behavior is an intentional Dark Pattern. You can sleep tight and write it off to the PO.

It is a chronic problem with Windows that Microsoft tries to stuff products I don't want up my nose, up my fingernail and toenails, into my pores and into other unmentionable body orifices. This has gone back to at least Win 98.

OneDrive, OneNote and many other Microsoft products have, I think, been much less successful they could have been because Microsoft worked really hard to kill them. I'd like to see a culture change at Microsoft where they stop doing this -- it's what I'd expect from that mobile OS that has a trashcan for a logo, not from the market leading desktop OS.

> Hey, sorry that happened, it should have preserved all of the default applications, etc.

Allow me to be skeptical. This isn't the first time.

> If you file a bug in feedback hub under the Windows Update category it will collect the diagnostics required to fix this issue and prevent it from happening again.

One user filing a bug will absolutely not "prevent it from happening again".

Microsoft tried that explanation before.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21684329

> It introduced a Browser Choice Screen pop-up in March 2010 as part of a settlement following an earlier EU competition investigation.

> But the US company dropped the feature in a Windows 7 update in February 2011.

> Microsoft said the omission had been the result of a "technical error".

> Microsoft has been fined 561m euros ($731m; £484m) for failing to promote a range of web browsers, rather than just Internet Explorer, to users in the European Union (EU).

I would believe this explanation if that this kind of "bug" would occasionally happen in the other ways, not benefiting Microsoft.

Computer owned by my sister and unfortunately using Microsoft was hit by something similar - massive slowdowns, request to upgrade some cloud drive (leading to credit card form).

Turns out that random local files were being deleted and moved into tragically slow cloud drive, and Windows in utterly misleading way claimed that space run out and demanded money for more space.

Hard drive had over 1 800 000 GB of free space and Windows claimed that she should pay for more space.

> If you also provide a link to the filed feedback to me I’ll be happy to triage it personally as I frequently work with the teams that are responsible for update migration.

That is an intentional user-hostile behaviour, not an accident. Or at least of pattern of not really testing for bug that increase some metrics (cloud drive adoption needs to be higher? lets show misleading message that will result in it being enabled!)

>Hard drive had over 1 800 000 GB of free space

1800 Tb free? No wonder you were mad.

Ops, sorry.

Sadly I cannot edit it anymore, so this typo will remain.

It was only 1 800 GB of free space

No offence but it is difficult to take bug report invitations such as this seriously when long standing bugs aren't fixed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c).

There is something deeply flawed with the culture at Microsoft / the Windows development team, and it has been that way the better part of a decade now. Stop milking your users for cents by turning Windows into malware.

> I frequently work with the teams that are responsible

If this bug is rare and your personal insistence on prioritizing this fix makes any kind of difference, that's a bug in the organization and a misalignment of individual and business priorities. If a team can be randomized by an isolated instance without taking overall impact into consideration, that's a warning sign about the health of the business and the product.

Note again that I'm not a spokesperson, merely a developer, so this is my own personal opinion:

In college one of the most transformative assignments I was given was actually a term paper where I was required to study what were then considered the three major sociological models for society (as I recall, so forgive me as it's been quite some time): structural-functional, social-conflict, and symbolic-interaction. In studying each of those sociological models, the one that resonated the most with me was that of symbolic-interaction.

The core idea behind the symbolic-interaction model, as I recall, being that society is a result of the everyday interactions between people just like you and me. With that in mind, I continue to believe that there are often key individuals within any given group of people, whether that is a corporation, government, or otherwise, that can drive significant, positive change throughout that group and that can have a profound effect outside that group as well.

I'd like to encourage folks to stop and consider for a moment that there are more than 1.4 billion monthly active devices running Windows 10 or 11. Obviously not all of those devices run any specific version of Windows, but that should provide some useful perspective. As a result, I'm always looking at the data, checking for patterns, and trying to identify both positive and unexpected trends. Cases like this are another opportunity for growth and to help others, and I'm happy to do so when I can.

Unrelated, but something that staggered me:

I have a pair of Bose QC35 headphones from 2016 or possibly 2017. They have bluetooth.

One day, an update to Windows 10 prevented them from working with Windows. If I'm remembering right, they would still "connect", but they couldn't play anything other than the occasional glitchy click sound. This problem was never fixed. I verified that they continue to work with non-Windows devices, and they failed to work with other current Windows devices.

I'm not sure how this could have happened, but it dramatically lowered my opinion of Windows.

I still have the headphones; if you know how to generate a relevant log I'll look into it.

There's every chance this is microsoft's fault, but bluetooth is also an ungodly mess of hacky junk that seems to get patched just enough to work with big hardware vendors, and then forgotten about.

My theory is that the bluetooth hardware community doesn't have any rigorous testing suite for compliance with the spec. Instead implementors just test with a few other vendors' half broken implementations of the stack, and then they patch their own hardware just enough to make it work and release things.

I bought a bluetooth keyboard and mouse a few weeks ago (both from different vendors). Neither device works over bluetooth on my linux workstation. I can get the keyboard to work by running some random commands I found on the internet, but it stops working when I sleep my computer. (A suddenly broken keyboard is the worst kind of surprise). The mouse has never worked over bluetooth. It just spits errors into my kernel's bluetooth stack.

Both devices are just plugged in via USB cables now.

I suspect linux's bluetooth stack is spec compliant, but its missing all the dirty workarounds for broken hardware that exist in macos and windows.

Anyway, Microsoft shouldn't have broken your headphones. But Bose is probably just as much to blame.

>If you file a bug in feedback hub under the Windows Update category it will collect the diagnostics required to fix this issue and prevent it from happening again.

As if it didn't happened AS intended, using a dark pattern by choice, and compatible with many other similar changes increasingly happening on Windows for the last 5 years or more?

I mean this could happen by accident right?!?

"Whoops! I'm so sorry, Mrs. H. I guess this just isn't my week."

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102266/quotes/qt0468298

It's a deceptive dark pattern not a bug and you know it. How incredibly condescending.

Thanks for the concern, but...

Why in the world would you develop at all a process for changing all my defaults over to MS's own products? That's a truckload of hubris, thinking that maybe I'd decide that every single one of the apps I normally use has suddenly been surpassed by Microsoft. I can't imagine why you'd even consider that anyone would want the change that was done to my system.

If I'm not mistaken browser doesn't reset unless you accept the prompt you get on first boot after the update to use default Edge settings.

I've definitely had Edge being set as the default browser following an update without any prompt to do so.

Just to give anecdata on the other side. I too just updated to 11 22H2 because my Oculus Rift S wouldn't run without updated drivers and I thought it best to update windows first.

No defaults changed for me. I wonder what the bug is. Note: I'm using Pro, not Home.

At the same time windows does drive me nuts with it's darkpartterns. The worst for me on Windows 11 was all the keyboard shortcuts that try to launch MS Office, MS Teams and related crap. The only way to turn them off is via PowerTools and even then they're not off on remote desktop.

I'm the post you're responding to. My install is the Pro edition as well. And the version I'm upgrading from was also W11, completely up to date on patches, I just didn't go to the 22H2 feature update until the GPU issues were fixed.

I've never had that happen to me in 20+ years of using and updating Windows. I suspected it's an urban legend but when a friend told me they experienced it with a feature update in Windows 11 I inquired further:

It turns out during the first startup after a feature update in Windows 11 (and 10) they sometimes show a bunch of new prompts, one of which is a very vague text with a big (default) "Recommended Settings" and a very small, differently rendered cancellation.

If you're one of the folks that just presses next / enter through a wizard without reading the instructions (which my friend was), you might have accidentally applied the "Recommended Settings".

And -of course- switching the browser to Edge is "recommended" by Microsoft.

Shitty dark pattern for sure but at least not forced settings change (yet).

describing it as forced is certainly technically wrong, but the results is no different. MS should not have done it, and the fact that they used a dark pattern to achieve it is not better than forcefully doing it!

I've never had it happen. The number of dark patterns trying to convince me to switch is infuriating. Major update "required sign in", defender "unsafe system state". I'm sure I've reset things accidentally and forgotten with it

To thoroughly exercise the old dark-pattern detection skills, I highly recommend a long day dodging the "upgrade invitations" in Turbotax.

Let me present a counterpoint.

I have two Apple machines. One is old and stuck on Catalina – three iterations behind the current macOS [Catalina -> Big Sur -> Monterey -> Ventura] – so for a long while I kept both on Catalina to avoid issues. Sadly, the older machine died a few weeks ago, so I decided to update the other machine to Monterey (because Ventura is still in the teething-troubles phase).

Now I get about 9 Mbps here, so I started the upgrade before bed, and left it overnight to do its thing. Next day I was presented with the garish boot Monterey boot-screen and logged in.

That’s it. This is a boring story.

There were a few small cosmetic differences, but otherwise everything was just as it was before. No clicks required. No dark patterns. Dare I say: it just worked.

There’s no reason Microsoft, or any other company, can’t do this. It’s simply respecting the user/customer.

I left the Microsoft universe about a decade ago simply because it felt too stressful. Nothing was concrete. It felt like the sand was always shifting beneath you. I have no love of Apple – I’ll move if they start playing games – but for now, they do most things – far from everything – well, and I never feel disrespected, even if my wallet is somewhat lighter every now and then.

Microsoft "update" somehow does this to me:

- I lost the ability to use my trackpad without having to wait for 1 second, holding my finger on the trackpad. This is palm-rejection. And there is NO way to turn it off. Rebooting the laptop temporarily sets the wait-time to 0 seconds, until I close the lid and sleep the laptop, then wake it again. There is a "sensitivity" feature, which uses words like "low" and "highest" .. and this does nothing to fix the issue, perceivable to me.

- I lost the ability to use my game-pad with built-in trackpad. I don't know why that feature disappeared. Clicking and swiping now does .. things .. but not moving the mouse nor right/left-clicking the button.

- I somehow failed to "update and shutdown." I chose that option, which said it should take 3 minutes. After 15 minutes, and multiple reboots, I was left BACK ON not shutdown, and the "update and shutdown" menu was still present. I don't know what Windows 11 even needed to update in the first place.

Overall Windows disrespects the user. Its "run all the drivers, on all PC configurations, from the beginning of time" is no doubt the culprit. That kind of complexity is impossible for humans to manage. (garbage-can emoji)

My transition to 11 has been mostly painless. Some weirdness I've experienced so far is a handful of default applications being changed (not Edge, surprisingly enough) and that since my default PDF reader is Okular all the icons for .pdf files are now a blank white rectangles instead of the nice white/blue okular icons they used to be. To be fair though, this could be some incompatibility with icon formats/sizes or something... I haven't looked into it.

My only real annoyance so far is that all my old context menu items are now tucked away into an additional context menu, such that I now have to right-click -> "Show more options" -> old context menu. A bit of an odd choice.

> My transition to 11 has been mostly painless

Sounds like Douglas Adams - mostly harmless

I just want to know how to turn the damn “anti malware service executable off”. I’ve turned it off in settings, I’ve added various registry keys but that damn process still haunts me.

The same service that sends Ms every bin you run? You've got a lot of Spectres in that machine I'm afraid.

Of many sh!ty things WU/upgrading does, this is the most infuriating one. Why on earth do MS want to be so hostile towards their users is beyond me. I haven't recommended Windoze laptop to any of my friends-n-family since the downward spiral of Win8 or so.

Linux/*BSD may still be that awkward friend who sometimes misreads your intentions and causes awkward moments or knocks glasses over, but at least tries to respect you (snapd excepted). Windows these days doesn't seem to respect you.

There's a difference in my mind between struggling to make your computer do something (because nobody made it easy yet) and struggling to make your computer do something (because a marketing team decided to try to stop you). Resolving the first scenario feels like working for myself, the other feels like fighting an adversary.

I try to not use products that don't respect me. That's fundamentally what keeps me almost exclusively on FOSS. Better alignment of incentives for what I'm trying to do.

Windows is the guy that makes you watch your drink at all times, because he clearly doesn't take no as an answer.

Are you sure? Why not? C'mon. Yes? Haha ok that definitely is a yes.

Do you want to upgrade your OS? Why not? C'mon, it's free! Please? Please upgrade your OS? Oh hey! I upgraded your OS while you were sleeping, no need to thank me.

As much as I dislike snapd, I don't see how that is a lack of respect. It's just unfinished not ready for production mostly, i'd say.

I see these things as being disrespectful about snapd (happy to be proven wrong):

- apt install firefox and other packages actually install via snap on Ubuntu. My intent was to install via apt. It should prompt me instead of silently using a different tool with different implications. For example, my firefox profile was silently copied to another folder with zero notification, causing issues with my tooling. - they're only now adding the ability to pause updates (an experimental feature!), after aggressively pushing snapd for years. Work arounds included telling the OS the Internet connection is metered, which sounds familiar. https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--... I feel disrespected when a tool imposes its own schedule on me and fights to enforce it. I appreciate that they added the Hold feature, but I feel the way we got it was due to continual, years long community push back. Reasonable defaults are fine. Let me edit them without fighting me. - proprietary server implementation, only canonical gets to run one or modify behavior. Distros can't run their own. I get that this might reduce fragmentation. To me the disrespect comes from not giving me a choice.

To me it's fine to aggressively push a tech. What I take issue with is the apparent intent to reduce end user control. If my impression is wrong, I'll recant. At least snapd seems to have slowly improved, my nfs mounts actually work in most snap apps now...

Linux would be best for the unsophisticated users that just want a browser and maybe OpenOffice, but those are the users least likely to try it.

I put Linux on my mom's laptop when it needed a good refurbish for this exact reason and IT support requests from her dropped to basically zero, even for seemingly platform-agnostic stuff like printing. Did everything she needed, I could update it for her over ssh, and just chugged along perfectly reliably since she isn't a poweruser that's poking at every part of her distro.

I use Linux (Ubuntu Mate) at home and Windows 11 at work (care giving at someone's home, helping him do minimal things).

Linux is like a friend, not even awkward at this point.

Windows is like a drunk at a bar, who, half an hour ago, was just talking too loudly but now has started groping you.

In ten years, I can imagine Windows trying to override literally anything someone does on their machine, including the text they type, if MS can imagine profits. Nothing is off the table, why should it be. Nothing stops this.

They bought SwiftKey and now whenever I type a phrase like "I'll do x" the entire word prediction bar is replaced with "add {do x} to Microsoft Todo"

It's such a great and helpful tool that does not make me resentful at all

>Windows is like a drunk at a bar, who, half an hour ago, was just talking too loudly but now has started groping you.

That's the best analogy I've seen of what modern Windows has become.

I think it's all about "intent" in summary.

After long enough it gets tiring battling people who's intent is ultimately maximum wealth extraction, rather than simply producing a good piece of software.

The intent behind most FOSS projects is just about the software, and sometimes we disagree on what and how (but that's why we have choices)... and some things are a bit creaky and come from different ages and don't fit perfectly together, but with a bit of fiddling and understanding you can gradually accumulate things that do what you want - and so it becomes more comfortable over time, not less, because they don't try to betray you at every turn.

This resonates with me, as someone who switched to Linux awhile back for similar reasons. Having an overtly adversarial relationship with the company who makes a major tool of mine is not a pleasant experience.

In addition to the points you raised, it always feels possible to fix something with Linux. It might an annoying PITA problem, but I can probably figure it out if I care enough to. With Windows (or Mac) when I encounter a problem with the OS, I never know if it's fixable or something the parent company insists on forcing on users.

> it always feels possible to fix something with Linux. It might an annoying PITA problem, but I can probably figure it out if I care enough to. With Windows (or Mac) when I encounter a problem with the OS, I never know if it's fixable or something the parent company insists on forcing on users.

This is such an important point imo. It characterizes an essential aspect of why using GNU/Linux just feels good to me, and why I feel boxed in on the big two proprietary desktops these days.

On Linux, the problems feel like my mess, my unfinished chores. They might be annoying, but they're not an invasion.

Absolutely spot on.

If only there was a way to pay money and then get printers / scanners / Bluetooth / wifi working properly on Linux, I'd definitely be doing that.

> get printers / scanners / Bluetooth / wifi working properly on Linux

Use a distro released some time in the last 20 years?

There are still a lot of wireless chipsets out there that suck ASS. If you want to get good support, just get whatever hardware most kernel developers use

I learnt my lesson 20 years ago when WiFi was a thing at first, that if you buy cheap crappy no-name WiFi cards, nothing is going to support them right, not even the manufacturer's drivers.

At this point printers and wifi work more reliably on Linux, at least in my experience.

And wifi troubleshooting at Windows is basically impossible.

Bluetooth is still the one missing though, specially for audio. I'm not going back to Windows though, no matter what.

Bluetooth on Linux works better than windows. Windows' Bluetooth implementation is the worst on the market, by a lot.

Bluetooth really does work flawlessly on Linux. I've even got a few cheap and nasty Chinese Bluetooth adapters that don't work on windows, but work fine under Linux.

I am not using bluetooth so I have not commented on it.

I also use Ubuntu and have no problems with printers and scanners and bluetooth. As annoying as Ubuntu is it does work out of the box for everything I've thrown at it

Bluetooth support on windows 10 is by far the worst of any operating system in the last decade. It's an absolute joke.

Bluetooth and wifi honestly do "just work" these days. There are some old or weird radios that don't have good drivers, but that's a problem money will solve. Just buy a radio known to work.

I can't say I've done much printing or scanning in the last few years, but it's basically fine these days. It's annoying as hell, but printers are always annoying, in any situation.

All of these were common problems several years ago, but they're pretty much solved these days. The real sticking point now is GPU drivers, and less commonly audio drivers. Linux is generally quite usable for a large number of people these days.

Apt-news made me finally leave Ubuntu after over a decade. I went to Debian and Arch depending.

Seeing ‘apt update’ shill r/Linux was the last straw after forcing-snap, forcing-Amazon ads, Wayland vs Mir, etc. I should have left years ago. Canonical, are you listening? Stop.

I'm surprised Canonical doesn't get more shit than they do. Not sure why no one talks about it

I think it is the low switching cost.

People complain about snap and unity (and wayland, systemd, gnome 3) all the time instead; some of those are harder to avoid any particular distribution.

Precisely. I get frustrated with computer interfaces that are hard to use all the time. But at least then it’s just the program which is stupid; I don’t have to get mad at anyone. But to have to deal with things that are actively working against me due to deliberate design decisions? That’s outright infuriating.

Windows has always been like that though. I remember switching to Linux full time back when XP was first released because I hated the direction Microsoft were going. The complaints people make now aren’t any different from the complaints I was making 20+ years ago.

Even snapd is mostly just an Ubuntu issue, you can always switch distros (though obviously Ubuntu is the most visible distortion so it’s actions have a lot of weight).

I try to not use products that don't respect me. That's fundamentally what keeps me almost exclusively on FOSS. Better alignment of incentives for what I'm trying to do.

It's worth noting that MS used to be far less hostile towards the user, and FOSS is not necessarily going to align with your incentives either[1]. To see what MS software was like before they became user-hostile, you can go to archive.org and get a download of Windows XP or older, along with some other MS software of the time, and try it in a VM.

[1] Notable examples being Ubuntu trying adware, the whole controversy surrounding systemd, and the direction Firefox is heading.

This beautifully sums up my experience with windows and Linux. Fighting my misbehaving Linux computer feels productive. Fighting windows just makes me angry and tired.

Yeah Linux is hard, but at least it isn't hard on purpose.

I left Windows for Mint about 2 months ago and it's just so much better. All that stupid bullshit you have to deal with on windows just went away, I felt actual relief. No more ads, no more forced updates because you walked away from your computer, no processes that it forces you to run so that it can spy on your mics. It just works. If you want it to look like windows 7 you can, if you want it to look like an iPad you can. I've made mine into a weird hybrid of windows 7 and OSX which I love. My start button actually shows my programs instead of loading bing and showing me 100MB of pictures of nigerian football players.

The only thing that was stopping me before was games, but games all work on linux now. Other than one or two that require specific anti-cheats that use 0days to hijack windows, there's basically nothing that doesn't run on linux now. In fact, a lot of my games actually work better because proton dynamically patches out bugs from the original windows implementations.

I don't think I've found any software or anything that I use that hasn't got a linux version. Windows is dead to me, I haven't used it since.

Me too my friend, I find mint a decent general desktop OS and I rarely touch windows for personal use. Still struggling with iTunes though.

Everyone struggles with iTunes. And every update makes it worse. I’ve used it on Mac and Windows and both suck

I just don't have a mac, that's really the only issue here. I went out of my way years ago to try and wrap my head around itunes, all the (too many) things it does etc. They mess that up a bit with updates (not as bad as windows) but it isn't terrible once you realize it's a whole bunch of apps rolled up into one. It doesn't do any of them really great but it's just a gateway to my devices so it isn't horrible.

> Everyone struggles with iTunes. And every update makes it worse. I’ve used it on Mac and Windows and both suck

It's technically no longer even there on macOS, thank God. It was becoming a sort of kitchen-sink dumping place, and I am glad that I can now manage my iPad through Finder (though I still wish I could just treat it like any other bulk-storage device, as I can on Windows, at least it's there). There are apps called "Music.app" and "TV.app", if I want to access my music and videos the Apple way, but I can and do just ignore them if I don't want to use them.

There are probably a multitude of other features that were in the old iTunes app that I never even noticed or have forgotten, but I think that a lot of users who used to be forced into using iTunes on macOS now can avoid both it and its replacements.

What are you using for a music replacement app? My library is 32GB now and I don't think I'm using any of the other itunes features these days, just using it as the path to sideload MP3s.

> What are you using for a music replacement app? My library is 32GB now and I don't think I'm using any of the other itunes features these days, just using it as the path to sideload MP3s.

After fighting a long time to own my music, I have to admit I got tired of maintaining a library, and mostly listen on Spotify these days. But I never liked the library-based model anyway, and so (when still dipping into my own library, and especially when watching movies) prefer an app like VLC that accepts that I might occasionally just want to play a media file without making a library. (Same thing with Books: for some reason, Apple can accept that I might just occasionally want casually to open a PDF in Preview, but finds it impossible to believe I might want to do the same thing with an ePub. I still haven't found a good non-library-based ePub app for macOS; I wind up just using the one that comes with calibre.)

epub; BookFusion. No mac app but the web reader might work for you. Sync reading position and notes between devices. I just read a lot of books and it works great for that. It even has a cablbre plugin used to upload books to it.

https://www.bookfusion.com

> epub; BookFusion. No mac app but the web reader might work for you. Sync reading position and notes between devices. I just read a lot of books and it works great for that. It even has a cablbre plugin used to upload books to it.

Thank you for the recommendation! Having to sign in is even less appealing to me than being forced to maintain a library, but it's good to have the option.

Can you use music.apple.com under chrome on mint?

Pretty much the only use case I have for itunes is to sideload music to my iphone, so I go into my windows partition a couple times a month to do it.

I had a similar problem, I just switched to foobar2k https://apps.apple.com/us/app/foobar2000/id1072807669 on my iphone. There are some... interesting UI design choices, but no itunes required. Decoupled https://decoupled.app/ is also nice.

LOL, Decoupled had me in the first paragraph of that about page!

I don't know why I never thought to try third party for music stuff, I will definitely check these out, thank you.

My music library is about 32GB now, hope those can deal with that.

What do you use iTunes for?

You can transfer photos etc out of IOS on mint. For music and videos you can download VLC on IOS and then it has a magic feature where it opens a localhost website which you can visit on your PC and transfer everything across over Wifi.

My experience leaving Windows was like yours... until I did a software upgrade or had to replace my graphics card, etc. Hours of fighting the command line, glitchy graphical bugs. For me, the desire to cultivate my linux computer like a garden ended up being a distraction from using my computer like the tool it is. Just my 2cents.

When was the last time you tried Linux? I just replaced my entire computer (CPU, motherboard, GPU, etc) and my Debian (bookworm) installation booted with zero issues. No need to reinstall anything.

I certainly remember fighting with xorg.conf settings, graphics drivers, and kernel modules in the past. I haven't had to deal with troubles like that in nearly 10 years though.

> When was the last time you tried Linux?

Ugh. Like, literally every time someone talks about having problems with Linux this exact same sentence is said in response.

I'm pretty much always trying Linux these days on various devices and I still constantly run into issues. Constantly. It's great that you have zero issues, but please consider that a lot of us aren't so fortunate.

There is a lot of Linux distros out there too.

Trying Debian Stable versus a bleeding edge Arch Linux will likely give wildly varying degrees and complexity of 'issues'.

What would you want them to do differently? They believe things have improved over time and want to share that information. I think it’s helpful but you seem to think it’s tiring or that they just shouldn’t?

If they think there has been a step change improvement in the linux experience then they should make that a falsifiable claim by specifying when it happened themselves.

Because 20 years ago using Linux meant that I had to deal with configuring ALSA, NDISWrapper, GRUB, CUPS, etc. whereas last night it took me less than 15 minutes to install Mint on a late-model ultrabook and have everything working perfectly. It's a real phenomenon.

Some vendors are better than others at Linux support. I would suggest sticking to Lenovo or Dell if you'd like a smooth experience.

I think its just a bit of a crapshoot with hardware. I'm running Mint right now and I love it, but hardware support isn't perfect:

- My AMD zen4 CPU still isn't fully supported by Mint's shipping kernel (5.15.0-56). It works today (including sleep states). But it took a month or two to get a kernel which supported sleep states correctly. And I still can't see CPU or motherboard temperatures.

- My keyboard and mouse don't work over bluetooth. I think its the vendors' fault, but I bet they'd both work fine work on macos or windows.

- My speakers randomly get all garbled and weird sometimes. I've figured out running `sudo killall pulseaudio` fixes it (until next time).

- I like using Apple's "magic touchpad". But the driver is nowhere near as good as Apple's. Sensitivity is all wrong in linux. It registers accidental light touches as clicks sometimes, and it just feels janky. And application support for smooth scrolling is all over the place - some apps support it perfectly and others (Firefox, IntelliJ) interpret any tiny single pixel scroll on the touchpad as a multi-line scroll. I've reverted to using a traditional mouse.

That said, some things have been a delight. My old AMD 480 graphics card worked perfectly out of the box, with no configuration required. When I upgraded out my motherboard and CPU a few months ago, the computer booted just fine with no reconfiguration or anything. It just took it all in stride. (I've still never seen windows handle that so well.)

I'm not surprised some people have no problems with desktop linux. But YMMV.

> I'm pretty much always trying Linux these days on various devices and I still constantly run into issues. Constantly. It's great that you have zero issues, but please consider that a lot of us aren't so fortunate.

While I find this true on Linux, I find it more true on Windows and OS X nowadays.

The difference is that with Linux, there is probably a workaround. If I have an issue with Windows or OS X (nee macOS) and it's not affecting a million people, I'm simply screwed.

That's what drove me off of Windows and OS X.

Can't speak for the other guy but the latest Ubuntu update absolutely wrecked my desktop. No network, no graphics. It blew my mind because I haven't experienced anything like this in more than a decade.

This experience pushed me straight into rolling release territory but I'd imagine most people would go to MS immediately, or even Apple if PC gaming is not something they do

I was using plain Ubuntu around 2020. Upgraded from an ancient GeForce to a pretty standard AMD graphics card and it totally wrecked my installation. While debugging in the command line, my screen was constantly flickering. Headache inducing. Then while trying to reinstall Ubuntu, I accidentally messed up my windows installation. It took a weekend to get everything back to normal, and it just wasn't worth it at all.

Wow that's really unfortunate. Recently with Fedora experienced the complete opposite with the same change, didn't even need to install drivers (or even remove the old ones), just worked out of the box. Long time I haven't used Ubuntu though. Biggest problem for me was the fact that the kernel was oftentimes too outdated (for my cutting edge needs), maybe that's why Fedora worked so well (Linux 6 already).

A live usb can have you back up and running in perhaps 30 mins. Haven’t had to suffer a broken install since live cds invented at the turn of the century.

Not all distros are created equal. Not sure what the best is in this regard but Pop!_OS seems to handle video card drivers well. It has worked well for me.

> no processes that it forces you to run so that it can spy on your mics

Is this hyperbole or a real thing that happened?

Bad time to be pushing this crap with the Linux desktop wooing the gaming/ power user overlap crowd now that steam deck is on the scene. I have been using Windows my whole life but now I have a PC dedicated to Linux for the 1st time and I'm thinking about seeing one up for my wife, as I'm sure Linux will be perform better on the older laptop I'm considering 'upcycling'. People forget that tech trends often flow outwards from the nerds who will actually try something new, then evangelize it to the world - see chrome for example

Yes 2023 is sure to be the year of the Linux desktop. (/s)

The reality is the computer form factor involving a keyboard is slowly becoming more and more of a niche. Windows has a lock on this niche for business and gaming. For other home use there is strong competition from apple and for education there is strong competition from chromebook.

Linux is still not really in the running, sorry.

The year of the Linux Desktop already happened, just not in the way people wanted - Android and Chromebooks.

Tbh, everyone I know who has used an Android "laptop" or "Chromebook" has abandoned it after ~6 months for a "real computer".

Turns out Native > Webshit for many things.

I'm never buying another Chromebook and Chromebox because Google sunsetted my perfectly fine working laptop and Chromebox and now it can't do things like play streaming movies from HBO Max because the chrome version is too low. Spotify doesn't work either. Leaves few things left to do with it haha.

Install Linux on it and you'll be able to use the latest version of Chromium and stream to your heart's content.

I think I'll just sell it and get a used Macbook Air, they go for like $99 on Ebay now.

Every time in my life I have installed Linux with such high hopes and get annoyed by all the crap that doesn't work.

Can you give some examples of "things which do not work"? Seeing how as I've been using Linux for close to 30 years and have it running on loads of different types of hardware with more or less everything working - yes even Bluetooth - I'm always somewhat surprised by these problems which fail to haunt me.

I think some people just don’t even bother to resolve an issue. Maybe it’s not even broken but just reflexively assumed to be broken if something isn’t immediately as they expect it to work. My parents both use Linux daily and rarely ever need me to provide any support. Ubuntu or Debian has worked out of the box on every machine I’ve touched over the last 10 years. Avoiding nvidia graphics is probably the secret to success though, and may be the issue responsible for many people who have a much more negative view of Linux “just working”

Wi-Fi is usually wonky and just various other things like video drivers etc.

Here is the laptop you wanted me to try to install Linux on lol. Who has time for this shit? I just want to use the computer not futz around with it constantly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/eku5tv/replacing_...

Like I said, spend $99 on MacBook Air, receive it, turn it on, it works. That’s all I care about. I don’t even like apple products really but I just want something I know will work.

That is an ARM laptop, which means you have an especially low chance of installing Linux easily. Get an x86 Chromebook and you would probably have less issue, but yes, you may still have some hardware issues (especially since Chromebooks have spotty desktop Linux support). Get an off-the-shelf x86 laptop and you probably would be fine; maybe you will have a few issues. But instead of faulting Linux, consider this? Could you install Windows on this same laptop? Probably not. In fact, on many laptops, hardware support is limited on Windows without vendor drivers (although, there is a chance that this has gotten less bad these days).

If you went and bought a used laptop that has official Linux support, like an XPS 13, then you could also open it, turn it on, and have it work with zero issues with Linux—the same way as a MacBook Air. Try Hackintoshing a random laptop from Best Buy and I think you will encounter similar issues with macOS.

That is the Year of Linux kernel, there is nothing else from GNU/Linux on Android and ChromeOS.

It's a pretty good argument in favor of the GNU/Linux vs. plain Linux distinction. Which is not a thing I really thought I'd say.

For you, maybe not. For me it has been in the running - and mostly in the lead - for close to 30 years. There's Linux on this iMac, on the Thinkpad sitting next to it, on the server these connect to, on the phones lying on the desk, on the tablet. For all I know there is Linux in the washing machine as well, I never bothered to look. It seems like Gates' vision of "information at your fingertips" has come true, the only thing "missing" is Windows. I do have a few virtual machines on the server for the few packages (VAG ELSA, looking at you...) which don't run well on Linux/Wine but these only get started every other blue moon.

By the way, the Chromebook you mentioned runs Linux. Google might eventually port this to Fuchsia but this remains to be seen.

I think OP's point is that there's one more major use case — gaming — for which Windows has a newly viable competitor. It's not that Linux is going to replace Windows, but that Windows could suffer a death by a thousand cuts. I'll note that more and more offices that I encounter seem to be switching to Chromebooks.

People keep saying this and then run into minor problems becoming bigger problems because frequently used programs end up being unusable or 3rd class citizen, behind both mobile and Mac users.

Unless Linux is braindead easy to use without frustrations, it won't happen. Gamers pay more for lesser ease of access increases.

Yes, people are strange. Every problem on Linux is deal breaker, all the problems on Windows aren't.

I mean, this is pretty easily explainable. People have grown up around Windows. The problems for the most part don’t change over time, so people have gotten used to them and have developed their own tried and true ways of doing something that sidesteps the problems they had.

Switching to Linux brings with it a whole new swath of problems and fixes Windows problems so not only are users seeing new issues, their workarounds now have to be worked around because whatever was wrong in Windows works in Linux. Add to that the fact that most Linux users are power users and instructions therefore lean towards that, and you’ve got a problem that also seems insurmountable to solve.

It’s the classic boiling frog dilemma. Windows has just had decades of heating water to get to where we are.

It's not 'every problem'. People know Windows. People understand most of Windows. They took years to do so, and they still run into problems. Now you ask them 'switch over to Linux, it doesn't have problem X', without understanding the average person doesn't want to invest the time or effort learning anything more complicated than downloading and installing a random .exe (why do you think phishing and malware are so prevalent in their infantile state?).

This is reinforced by most major apps which eventually become cross-platform starting out treating Linux as a 3rd class citizen. For games, Discord and Parsec come to mind, where the former took years, and the latter still doesn't allow hosting from Linux. Nothing about this reinforces the idea of Linux being easier to use. It's the opposite: it reinforces the mentality that Linux is still two decades behind, regardless what the reality may be.

How many complaints form when YouTube pushes a minor UI or UX change? Now multiply that by a few magnitudes of order. That is the problem we're dealing with, and no amount of chastising or belittling Windows users will change that (in fact, it does the opposite). Did people forget how Apple managed to get a foothold in the market despite their ludicrous prices and dev-unfriendly practices?

It's not even this. It's just that for vast majority of 'average' people, they just use whatever OS comes with their devices. "Installing an OS" is an alien concept for most people. So it is automatically either MacOS/iOS or Chromium/Linux (Chromebook), Android or Windows. That's it. And although Linux the kernel features in two of these, that's totally beside the point. The point is people mostly don't even know how to change their preinstalled OS, no matter how irritating it is. If it develops too many issues, they take it to the local tech shop who almost always will reinstall/reset the same OS and give it back.

The only people who use Linux are the tech oriented crowd, including gamers, who naturally tend to be more tech oriented than most. This is still a very small fraction of the world though. And this isn't changing unless a healthy fraction of devices and PCs come with Linux preinstalled. Even then a lot of people will complain and ask for Windows (or whatever) the very next day after purchasing their device.

> People know Windows. People understand most of Windows.

Not in my observation. They get something pre-installed, they click on things they know. I am always amazed by the fact that most don' t have the smallest mental image of how it works.

Many people highly value continuity, if it’s working it should keep working the same way for a very long time. Once a Linux computer is working, even if it’s more work to get it to that state, keeping it working is much easier than with Windows. Using updates to force major breaking changes should be a crime.

If you play AAA titles, you’re not moving away from Windows.

Why? Looking at top PC games lists of 2022, almost all of them are supported on Steam Deck. All the games I’ve played on there run fantastically well. On a sale I bought Assassin’s Creed Odyssey which is an older AAA game and Steam Deck even runs fine.

Anti-Cheat. Most multiplayer shooters will refuse to run under Linux.

Since the announcement of the Steam Deck, Valve has made various promises to work with the AC providers to bring support to Linux. So far they have brought support for Epic's EAC, and it seems they are working on bringing it for other titles as well.

Most is a stretch.

The FPS in the top 100 currently most popular games on Steam[0] and their status [1]:

  #01 CS:GO - native
  #04 PUBG - anticheat
  #05 CoD MW2 - anticheat
  #06 Apex - Works (it has anticheat that works on Linux)
  #07 TF2 - native
  #09 Rust - Works
  #12 Destiny 2 - anticheat
  #21 Rainbow 6 - anticheat
  #22 DayZ - Works (it has anticheat that works on Linux)
  #26 Warframe - Works
  #69 Payday2 - Works
  #78 Arma 3 - Works (it has anticheat that works on Linux)
  #79 CS:S - Native

Native or working: 9/13

Broken: 4/13

Non-steam or outside top-100:

  OW2 - Linux is second class and not actively supported - but Blizzard have unblocked Linux support when issues were reported
  Battlefield (all?) - Works
  CoD (before MW2) - Works
  Gundam Evolution - anticheat

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/charts/mostplayed

[1] https://www.protondb.com/

Sadly even a few top games not running on Linux is enough to keep most PC gamers off of Linux.

I'm probably spectacularly unlucky as I play Siege, Destiny 2, CoD MW2, Hunt Showdown (#63), and the occasional Fortnite (EGS) and Valorant (Riot), none of which work.

Battlefield 2042 is on Steam but not supported, though I'm not sure if that's the anti-cheat solution or Proton.

An increasing number of games with Anti-cheat work.

https://areweanticheatyet.com

With Win 11 I get Micro-stuttering which makes gaming a nightmare. I’ve given up on getting it fixed. I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft to accidentally kill their cash cow via an accumulation of small mistakes and a loss of key competence.

If using Windows is death by a thousand cuts, using Linux is obliteration by ten thousand.

Linux has completed 90% of the work, but the last 10% (usability) is a long way away.

Dunno man, I’ve been using Linux on the desktop for almost 3 decades. It’s been ok for me :) conversely I can’t stand using windows for more than a few minutes - luckily I don’t have to do this often.

If you're a veteran Linux user, you probably know where to look for config files and how to hack them. Trying to use Linux using GUI only, whichever you choose, is awful. It's like the designers copied the worst ideas from both Windows and MacOS on purpose and then added some of their own.

You don't need to hack config files. The big DEs have GUI settings for pretty much everything macOS or Windows does. The only reason it might not seem like it is tutorial websites where it's easier to post a one line command then screenshots for 7 different GUIs.

"it's easier to post a one line command then screenshots for 7 different GUIs"

Yeah, that's the thing. It often feels GUIs on linux are meshed together from at least 7 different styles and paradigms and too often they are indeed made like this.

So in Ubuntu for example I sometimes had to click left to close a window and sometimes right.

What laypersons want, is one single way to do things, that works. But you just won't get far, without the terminal. That is, things do run pretty much out of the box if you are lucky - until they don't. And then good luck trying to fix it without the terminal. I can parse and usually fix cryptic error messages and logs, but my father (who is a trained engineer, but no english speaker nor programmer) cannot. Unless of course there is a driver issue. I seldom can fix them and I encountered too many over the years.

In either case, I am lucky that linux exists and I am now off to try out EndeavourOS ..

I get this effect much worse on windows. Right click the volume icon in the task bar and look through the windows you get. There's three different styles dating back to Windows 95!

Flip through stuff on the control panel and you'll get the same mash of code heaved forward from the 90s. It's a bad look, and I've always been so confused why Microsoft doesn't do anything about it. Seems like a great pet project for some nth level middle manager to get sweet bonuses for.

Do you remember the two control panels from Windows 8, where some settings were available only in one and others in the other? One did look quite modern.

I prefer using the GUI, but frequently find I have to hop back into the terminal to chmod/chown some file that's ended up without the appropriate permissions. I think a casual user would probably give up at that point.

Using KDE, everything can be changed using only a mouse (or a finger with a touch screen).

Yes. The only problems are that the control panels are incredibly illogical at best (this is one of the things I meant with the "worst ideas from both Windows and MacOS and some of their own), and often just don't seem to work or need to be used in a specific non-intuitive way. Command line and config files are the way to stay sane and get things done.

> If you're a veteran Linux user, you probably know where to look for config files and how to hack them.

Unfortunately these days even that keeps getting changed. Part of the reason I'm happier on FreeBSD.

I agree but this won't be a "real" problem. It just gonna be put under the rug by most.

No problem has been described.

I actually wrote about using Linux as a daily driver for a week for everything, gaming included: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-...

In short, Proton is making pretty good progress and anyone can check their own Steam library with ProtonDB, to see how many of the titles they care about are likely to work.

Out of the popular mainstream games, around a half will work on Linux, whereas in the case of my Steam library (mostly indie titles) that figure is closer to 75%. This is no doubt thanks to shipping games now being simple in most of the popular game engines out there (like Unity, Unreal and even Godot). However, some games have the occasional bug, whereas others just straight up refuse to launch.

Also many users don't use things like AMD Software, but I personally didn't really find a good alternative for it on Linux, to limit my GPUs power usage and alter the fan curve, CoreCtrl coming close but not quite being a viable replacement: https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl

Back to games, there will be issues with either really old niche titles that you might want to play, or many of the modern games that have multiplayer components (and anti-cheat systems), or sometimes even two games from the same publisher/developer might have one of them be available on Linux but not the other (e.g. War Thunder works but Enlisted doesn't).

In short, Linux is definitely getting better and might already be sufficient as a desktop daily driver even for the folks who want to do some gaming, but isn't a 1:1 replacement and some things just won't work for a variety of reasons. That said, claiming that "The Year of the Linux Desktop" might eventually come no longer feels delusional - it might just be 5-20 years until we get there for regular folks.

This probably wouldn't have happened without Valve's involvement, as well as all of the people who work on Wine and other software like that.

Games developed on Windows desktops, targeted for Windows desktops, running by translating the Windows API.

Does that ultimately matter? Proton/WINE etc. create a compatibility layer for Windows on Linux, and WSL/Cygwin etc. creates a compatibility layer for Linux on Windows. If one is cheaper and offers less bullshit, the other one is threatened. It's a moat coming down.

OS/2 has proven how much it matters.

WSL is nothing new, the only thing it brings to the table is that we don't need to install VMWare or Virtual Box.

I don't dual boot since 2005.

wine runs older windows games better than modern Windows

with Microsoft's declining focus on compatibility, the time is coming where the majority of Windows games now run best on something that isn't Windows

(not to mention the lack of ads, spyware, general lack of stability and forced reboots)

If you search for Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8,...., versus Linux, you will find similar arguments being made as prophecy of the great migration.

previously there wasn't an extremely profitable, market leading, privately owned gaming company with a founder that is completely and utterly determined to ditch Microsoft

and share the result of that freely with the world

By creating a platform that emulates Windows, otherwise no one would bother to target their device natively.

Those 2% market shared are filled with games that are developed on Windows, targeting Windows.

Meaning those game studios will keep giving Microsoft money, and letting Valve do the needful to work on their platform.

> By creating a platform that emulates Windows, otherwise no one would bother to target their device natively.

this is a stopgap measure to bootstrap demand for the platform

because these days the target platform isn't Windows

it's the game development kits sold as a service, like Unity and Unreal Engine

both of which are now supported natively

> Meaning those game studios will keep giving Microsoft money

now you've lost me

(it's also bizarre that you pop up in every single "Windows bad" post right on cue to defend Microsoft's honour)

(edit: ah, found your linkedin, so you're an MS employee, I guess that explains it then)

I am an employee of a well known Fortune 500 consulting company, but definitly not Microsoft, better luck with your search next time.

Microsoft is a company, there is no such thing as honour for business, only money and profits.

Same applies to dumb quotes like "do no evil" and similar.

You're right, Windows isn't the main target platform for AAA game studios, Playstation, XBox, Switch, iOS and Android are the ones briging big bags of money home.

A lot of games run on Linux natively and newer games are using Vulkan. We can't help that the feds didn't go after Microsoft for paying game devs to try to lock non-console games to Windows.

In my workplace folks are begging for MacBooks.

Macs have been Unix with Photoshop and Office for decades now.

At my workplace people are begging for Linux but unfortunately we got Macs.

M1 Macbooks are alien technology compared to Windows (performance and battery life) or Lunux (professional app support) ones. The main barrier to switch is different keyboard layout — after a month of using Mac as a home PC (switching from workplace-issued Linux) unfamiliarity with keyboard is the main hurdle, especially on non-English layout.

On the contrary, Linux is in a good position for the same reason you think it isn't. As the desktop/laptop market shrinks to advanced users, it loses the long tail of users who weren't technically capable enough to switch. At the same time, WINE/proton and even some native ports have vastly improved the gaming scene on Linux, and a decent chunk of non-gaming applications too. Sure, there will always be certain business applications that refuse to work on anything but actual Windows, but Linux works for a decent and growing part of the shrinking niche that is "real computers".

Just played some games on Linux Steam yesterday. It works so smooth. The Steam client is actually buggy at times with a tiling WM, but all the games worked great.. even the oned with Proton.

It's actually amazing how well games work under Proton. Even a significant number of multiplayer titles just work, despite anti-cheat. There's some "random problems" sometimes with some titles, sure... but that's also true on Windows. Interestingly the problematic titles are more or less exactly opposite to Windows - new titles tend to work well on Windows and perhaps have issues on Linux (requiring some specific launch options or Proton version, perhaps graphical glitches). Meanwhile older titles are often problematic on Windows, but are less so on Linux. Might just be my selection bias though.

> Sure, there will always be certain business applications that refuse to work on anything but actual Windows

I disagree with this statement, especially in the case where there's somebody motivated enough to patch Wine to support specific applications.

At the end of the day, Windows applications expect a set of interfaces. As long as those interfaces exist and work as expected, the application will work.

Not all issues are technical issues. There might be licensing reasons why 'actual Windows' is required. Such nonsense is not unknown.

Until and unless Microsoft Office products are on Linux natively and are supported by Microsoft, Linux will never be a mainstream operating system. And that's never going to happen.

The web based Office 365 my university gives us seems to work as well on Linux as any other platform AFAIK (unfortunately that's still not perfect). It did claim to need Edge for some things, but that's relatively minor.

This is becoming less and less true every day. Both online office 360 and gsuite are popular in offices these days with no ms office installed on the device. Outside of specific business roles, I haven't seen it in a long while. I've even run into a medical clinic running on libreoffice.

My Android phone runs native Microsoft Office apps, so we are half-way there.

I am just waiting for Microsoft to give up on Windows-on-Arm and instead create a Microsoft-branded Linux distribution that has an actual Windows subsystem for Linux (that is, a compatibility / emulation layer similar to Wine or Proton to run legacy Windows software).

Decades of backward compatibility makes Windows a resource hog. I do not think it can make the jump to Arm or RISC-V easily.

Huh? The move from x86 is hampered by making binaries compiled for x86 work on ARM, it has nothing to do with performance.

Ironically enough I've found that O365 works far better on Firefox and Chrome on Linux than it does on those browsers on Windows, and Microsoft O365's support team warn against even attempting to use Windows 10 and Edge.

There isn't any more a "native" office. Now it's a web app -> Office 365

Every business I've ever been part of in my entire adult life has used Google docs or libreoffice. I genuinely haven't seen MS office since high school.

I worked for a fortune 500, and they used a custom Unix type OS with libreoffice. We ended up using mostly Google docs though.

Unlikey. PC gamers don't care if they're running Windows or Linux, they just want the top 10 games to run. Linux can't even do that.

And the business world will never switch to Linux.

Sorry, but does it.

I suggest you check which of the top 10 games run on Linux.

I (of course) did, and it seems like it proves my point.

I don't think that's really true. Recent trends show the % of desktop/laptop users has normalized and is no longer trending down.

Soo niche except for 99.99999% of devs

A lot of devs don’t want to tinker with Linux. Myself included. And this is disregarding all of the work places that only give out Windows or MacOS machines.

I use Linux. No tinkering required if you use a major distro. I used to like to tinker with stuff, but slowly my viewpoint changed. Most of the time these tweaks are just different, not better, and a waste of time. Worse, whenever you have to use a more stock configuration on another machine, you are fumbling around. These days I just use the defaults on almost everything, whether Windows, Mac, or Linux.

The comment I am replying to says that computers with keyboards are niche, that's what I'm replying to

Also I've spent a grand total of 30 minutes tinkering with my Linux machines this year, windows has had to be reinstalled twice.

No tinkering required. Tinkering can be tempting and dangerous, but if you keep yourself in check it's just not a thing you need to do. Unless you install Arch, but then you deserve what you get. Just install Ubuntu or Pop and you'll be fine.

"No tinkering required" needs to come with a big YMMV. Most of the devs I've polled about their Linux experience matches the OP, they tried it and went back to Mac/Windows.

As a developer I tried Linux for 1 year (no dual boot). It was such traumatic experience, that I would never repeat it again.

Even the majority of “command line devs” are satisfied by Mac or even WSL for their machines. The servers they connect to are almost always Linux, however.

Apparently not, since every time Microsoft does something boneheaded that alienates their "command line devs" we hear about it on hackernews.

If they didn't keep using it we'd've only heard about the first time.

It's almost as if those are multiple people with different tolerances for microsoft induced pain

Not me, I make it a habit to try Linux every year to see what the major distros are, and test their feasibility as a replacement for MacOS. I usually run into bugs and lots of necessary copy-paste from the internet to get random features working.

While there are still use-cases where the traditional laptop/desktop form-factor remains the answer and there are Windows users, Windows getting worse and Linux getting better will continue to see people migrate over.

No, there' won't be an explosion, it's a death by a thousand cuts. The bemused amongst us are wondering why Microsoft is the one holding the knife.

If anything, I think it's the other way around.

WSL2 is now so good, that you can get away with not needing Linux at all.

I pretty much live in WSL2 at work. While it makes Windows tolerable, it's not even close to as good as a full Linux desktop.

> it's not even close to as good as a full Linux desktop

I use "a full linux desktop" at work (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS) and the desktop UI bugs and limitations are a nightmare. Give me Windows and WSL any day in comparison. At least there I know that basic stuff like clipboard and screen sharing/capture always works flawlessly, and windows don't magically get stuck to one aspect ratio and nost wasting my time trying to google fixes for snap/wayland/apt bugs.

Sure, some of these bugs I encountered could be Ubuntu, or Gnome, or Wayland, or pipewire issues, but as an employee, I don't have time to distro hop at work in search for the Linux experience with the least amount of jank or find out which component of this bazaar engineering efort is the one responsible for this jank.

Sure, I don't see ads in my Ubuntu install, but it's 2022 and the clipboard in Firefox in Ubuntu still stops working randomly, which causes me way more productivity loss than seeing a candy crush icon in the Win start menu. Firefox bug tracker says the clipboard issue fixed on their end whenever this bug gets reported and says it must be now a Wayland issue, while Wayland devs say this is a Firefox issue, meanwhile me and severa other Ubuntu users are complaining about our clipboards being broken in FF. FML, it's 2022 and I still can't have a working clipboard on Linux, one of the most used basic features on any OS. "Year of the Linux desktop." Yeah.

Not to mentions the lack of hibernate(not sleep) on Ubuntu. I spend almost an hour trying various tutorials and command line incantations that had the risk at bricking my OS, to get hibernate working, and no cigar, and I realized Ubuntu really, really wants you not to use hibernate at all cost. I never thought it would be missing a basic feature so simple as "dump entire RAM contents to SSD, then at power on, copy them back to RAM and resume". Sure, Linux boffins will tell me this is a limitation due to the use of Z-RAM compression or something, but me as an end user, I don't care which technical decision has lead to this limitation, as it doesn't fix my problem of not having hibernate.

Ubuntu is bizarrely terrible for being the main recommended distro. I have to assume they're heavily focused on the server space these days. It even shows ads when doing cli software updates these days! That's part of what people are trying to get away from in the first place!

It amazes me how much mind share Ubuntu still has with people. A lot of the Linux community has left Ubuntu over the past 5 years, especially since the Snaps were added.

LinuxMint is a vastly better experience today because it's focused on being the best for desktop users, while Ubuntu isn't any more.

>It amazes me how much mind share Ubuntu still has with people. A lot of the Linux community has left Ubuntu over the past 5 years, especially since the Snaps were added.

Not people, Ubtunu is what my company's IT departament provides everyone in the backend team use on our managed ThinkPads. I could protest, nuke it and spend time switching to Mint or something else based on 22.04 LTS that IT could also manage, but then I'm the one on the hook for any issues that arise with that one, and let's face it, it's Linux we're talking, no distro is ever bug free, they all show some jank once the honeymoon period is over depending on your hardware and software use cases.

I’ve never had problems with the clipboard or sharing. Unfortunately it sounds like you should use X for a few more years if you have no tolerance for issues.

Yes, X11 has virtually no bugs, but switching to X11 messes up touch pad gestures and gives me nauseating screen tearing when scrolling content, especially on my portrait oriented monitor. And no amount of googling command line incantations for xorg.conf or 20-intel.conf has fixed it (plus, a lot of the suggested answers were straight up wrong and would have bricked my display output if I just copied them from SO without knowing some Linux display driver basics), so back to Wayland and clipboard and screen capture/sharing issues.

This is in now way a good user experience.

Windows still beats Ubuntu hands down for me in terms of having less annoying issues that kill my productivity.

Unfortunately you’ll pay dearly with your privacy so not a free ride.

Oh boy. I tried, really. WSL2 is good enough to test things and run docker, but as soon as you try to run X applications, remote in with ssh on your laptop, or try to use full power, the limitations become clear soon.

I tried, on the new job. I've dealt with windows for 6 months, but 2 weeks ago I was sick of it. There is always something not working right. If a computer is a bicycle for the mind, Windows 10 has training wheels and a hysterical helicopter mom screaming 'you're gonna fall!' all the time. Death by a 1000 papercuts. I've reformatted it and run kubuntu now. I will miss excel, and online outlook is not as good as the real thing, but these are sacrifices I am willing to make just to get rid of the whiney drug addict called windows 10.

I'm not going to say Linux is perfect. Plenty of dumb cuts in there too. But at least it treats me with respect, at least the KDE world does.

Ymmv, of course. The job is great enough to let each run his or her preferred OS. As a recent escapee from a hyper standardized environment, I am loving it

Strange take. WSL2 _is_ Linux, running in a hypervisor with proprietary APIs for acceleration [0]. You're not using an alternative to Linux, you're using Linux that's been vendor-locked to require Windows.

[0] https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/d3d12.html

>People forget that tech trends often flow outwards from the nerds who will actually try something new, then evangelize it to the world - see chrome for example

trillion dollar marketing seems to be more important factor than "nerds"

see Linux for example

There's ofc Android, but people have no choice - you are either "rich" (outside US) and want to buy iphone or go with android

Off topic but I really wish the regular old mouse and scroll wheel would work ”normally” straight out the box on fedora/ubuntu/etc. It’s really such a horrible experience coming from Windows when using the mouse is all icky not having ”proper” (Windows default) acceleration on and scroll wheel scrolling one line at a time.

Like many people I really want to make the jump but still hang on to Windows via O&O Shutup 10.

I have been using Linux as my primary OS for many years, but this particular issue is stubbornly baffling. There are solutions of course but they are not really good.

I don't know what you're talking about, but I've never had any mouse wheel issues on Linux, when I dual booted daily so it had plenty of chances to compare. In fact I made sure I had the exact same mouse speed on both OS.

My wheel doesn't scroll a line at a time, and there are three acceleration modes for the pointer-default,adaptive and flat.

I keep hearing people complaining about Linux with the weirdest problems ever.

Sounds good, I’ll try again when I have time.

My latest attempt was back in Summer with Fedora 36 and a Logitech mouse. The default was one line at a time and I could not find a setting for it. (Apart from Firefox config but I need multiple browsers.)

Amusingly I even gave Chromebook (kind of a Linux) a proper try and with the scroll wheel it too scrolled a single line at a time.

This is ironic to read as I felt the windows mouse controls were dogshit compared to what I had with macOS

This may or may not help, but this mouse has variable acceration (DPI) and I've been pretty happy with it.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071J9JC6S

Those 2% market share are looking great.

The Year of Desktop Linux is as virtual machine running on top of Apple and Microsoft desktop OS, or having the complete userspace replaced like on Google OS offerings.

I've held on to windows just for gaming, but Valve has been making huge strides turning linux into a viable option for that. Whenever support stops for Windows 10, I may have to give it a try

Honestly, ubuntu is doing similar UX breaking crap... every two years you need to relearn where to set the static ip, apt-get is snap, or snap is apt-get or who knows what you'll get when you need a simple install, and phoning home is preinstalled too.

I’ve had better luck with rolling release desktops because at least things break and change slowly over time.

Each new Ubuntu is a whole new beast on the desktop (and sometimes even on server).

Yep. I honestly think that if you loved Linux 10 or 20 years ago you're better off with FreeBSD these days.

There are still some distros that are usable... notably gentoo or arch... but the "pretty" ones, especially the debian/ubuntu based ones, have really gone downhill.

Try LinuxMint. It's Ubuntu but without the Snaps. There is a reason it's 4 positions above Ubuntu on DistroWatch.

This message is 20 years old. Many of us long for the utopia of a Linux desktop that just works, where drivers are up to date and X windows doesn't die due to a yum/apt-get update.

This feels like a future parody thread where someone will make fun of our comments.

The Linux desktop arrived under the guise of Android.

The rest is minor noise, sadly.

At least it is possible to have a working Linux desktop but that was true twenty years ago.

Oh really? Where are these widely used/popular Android desktop and/or laptop machines?

They’re called phones and they’re killing the windows desktop like Linux users wanted in the 90s.

It’s a very monkey’s paw scenario.

That’s simply untrue. I have a phone, a tablet, and a laptop. I do different things on each. None has supplanted the others; they all supplement each other.

You do that, but it doesn't generalise. Mobile phone ownership exceeded laptop/desktop ownership in the us in the last 2 years and the latter is in a slow constant decline. A lot of people are going to be happy with just the phone in the future.

We went from computers being very rare (early on I remember maybe two families out of the whole class had one at home) to heading to above one per person (everyone had a laptop and there would be a desktop, too, or more) during college and now we're headed back towards "about one desktop/laptop per house or a bit more" as most people have phones.

Citation needed. Moreover, what's the evidence that those that make do with only phones would even want to purchase a tablet or laptop?

Edit: also, conflating phones with "desktops" is just being glib and disingenous.

> Citation needed

Literally the top results for US smartphone ownership. You can do it.

> that those that make do with only phones would even want to purchase a tablet or laptop?

That's the whole point - they don't need / want one. But given the services that everyone needs are moving online, everyone needs some level of internet access. This effectively moves windows users to Linux/Android as discussed upthread.

I see. So you're not actually going to even try and answer the question? No evidence? Just "I'm going to conflate desktops and phones to make my point?"

Accidentally Android spies on you to the extent Microsoft couldn't even dream of in their evilest of dreams. And there is no way to root/control it to prevent that spying. Unlike Windows.

> And there is no way to root/control it to prevent that spying.

Can you explain what you mean here? How do AOSP ROMs subject themselves to Google's spying, much less the meticulously-designed privacy distributions?

> Accidentally Android spies on you to the extent Microsoft couldn't even dream of in their evilest of dreams. And there is no way to root/control it to prevent that spying. Unlike Windows.

https://www.grapheneos.org/

I know, but nobody uses it, for a reason.

I know a lot of people who use Tablets as their main driver and don't have a PC (or only use it for edge cases). Not even for ideological reasons, it just works for them. It's not universal, but it's not rare, either.

Chromebooks I suppose. https://www.gsmarena.com/pc_and_tablets_see_strong_sales_per...

They may run Android apps, but they are not Android devices.

By that logic, my Linux machine is a Windows machine, because it has Wine/Proton.

This had been the opposite of my experience though. Maybe I got lucky with hardware, but I've never had issues with out-of-date drivers (outside of CUDA dependencies for research work) or having X or Gnome or whatnot break during an update.

But, I need to use Windows at my employer, and it's horrible. I wish Windows were at a point where it was ready for development.

Right now, the best dev setup is "install Linux in a VM" or "install this collection of incomplete ports/emulation/virtualization of Linux tools".

With Proton for gaming and Electron for desktop especially, Linux on the desktop is way different than it was 10 years ago, let alone 20.

My Nvidia driver literally just died last week or the week before. I had to reinstall it to make it work.

Just out of curiosity (as the website suggests lol), which distro were you using? I long left Nvidia as it's really a no-go on Linux but I noticed different distros had VASTLY different experiences with it. For instance Mint was very stable and simple to install drivers, but they were ofter outdated. Fedora was more work through rpm fusion but I also got a better experience and even managed to use Wayland. Some distros didn't even work with my setup.

In my opinion the biggest advantage and problem of Linux is the fragmentation. Linux is a word that encompasses too many variations of many systems on top of different versions with different build options of a kernel. This is why I always choose to talk about a distribution instead of Linux itself, since the kernel is just a part of the system (insert GNU/Linux copypasta here).

edit by ChatGPT, which apparently does not know about the copypasta): "Linux is actually GNU/Linux, or as I like to call it, the dynamic duo of the operating system world. The Linux kernel is like Batman, all tough and powerful, while the GNU tools and libraries are like Robin, always there to support and help out. Together, they make a unstoppable team that can take on any challenge.

But, let's be real here, without the GNU tools and libraries, the Linux kernel would just be a confused and frustrated little kernel, wondering why it can't do anything useful. So, it's important to give credit where it's due and call the whole operating system GNU/Linux.

Now, I know some of you might be thinking, "But wait, isn't Linux just for nerdy hackers and command line wizards?" Well, to those people I say, "Hold my beer, I'll show you how wrong you are." Because, these days, there are plenty of user-friendly Linux distributions that are perfect for everyday users. And, even better, most of them are free and open-source, so you can customize and tweak them to your heart's content.

But, let's not forget about the elephant in the room: NVIDIA. Yes, I'm talking about that greedy, selfish, proprietary-loving company that just can't seem to get its act together when it comes to Linux support. I mean, come on guys, we're not asking for much, just some stable drivers that don't crash all the time and support the latest features. Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is, because NVIDIA just keeps letting Linux users down.

So, in conclusion, if you want to join the awesome world of GNU/Linux, go for it! You won't regret it. And if you're already using GNU/Linux, give yourself a pat on the back and keep spreading the word. And, if you're using NVIDIA on Linux, well, good luck to you my friend, you're going to need it."

Ubuntu 22.04 with proprietary NVIDIA driver. I made no changes to the driver nor tinkered with any settings. I did not run any weird/nerdy applications that might have affected the GPU at all.

The only thing I did was running `apt update` and `apt upgrade` every day. One day, it just stopped booting into my desktop environment. Instead, it showed a blinking cursor. I followed some random tutorials online and uninstalled the driver, which fixed the issue.

> having X or Gnome or whatnot break during an update.

This happened exactly once (nvidia driver update killed x as it tried to reload the kernel driver).

Still better than system update deleting all your documents, right? (yes, I know that it happened only once too, but since the nvidia problem is a fair game, deleting user documents is the same).

My Nvidia driver dies every single update.

It's basically part of every update, first thing I have to do is reinstall the Nvidia driver via ssh every single time.

And maybe every month or so, when I reboot it comes up in some ridiculous resolution, like 640x480 or something. This is also fixed by reinstalling the Nvidia driver.

When I get a new desktop (main PC is Windows), I switch my linux server to my old hardware. I just bought an AMD GPU for my desktop so in a couple of years when I upgrade my desktop, I'll be rid of Nvidia bullshit once and for all.

I just went through this pain, and fortunately my gpu just died during the process so I jumped to amd. It's like a breath of fresh air, my computer just works now.

Except now there's a bug and I can't use the integrated Intel graphics at the same time. Great. Works fine otherwise though, and I don't have to fuck around with my drivers ever again

> Right now, the best dev setup is "install Linux in a VM" or "install this collection of incomplete ports/emulation/virtualization of Linux tools".

Actually it's, "request a Macbook" or "work in a place where devs get Macs".

Haha, yeah, that's actually what is going on here! But I'm still trying to see if I can get a Linux machine here.

Side note to any Linux devs considering MacOS: Be expected to also request at least ~$200 of software for OS features we might otherwise take for granted. (Window management, per-app volume management, etc.) Other niche features might be totally unavailable (eg. moving windows between desktops with keyboard shortcuts, or speeding up input-blocking animations) because there's no API provided to make it possible.

Microsoft has not a lot of interest in home power users. They need windows for business customers. And the majority of home users just keep the default system their PC came with. So if a few home users switch to Linux they probably won’t care at all.

Chrome as an example? They had an advert on top of the most successful search engine. Hardly a grassroots effort.

People won't bother with Linux, nor other alternative systems. Many don't even change the desktop wallpaper. The computer works out of the box, as it comes, and that's the end of the customization story. In order to achieve Linux majority, it needs to become the de facto standard: governments need to use it, schools need to teach it, and businesses need to use it. And it needs to come on computers preinstalled, compatible with all these other systems. Otherwise, no dice. The question is not technological - Linux has been fine for a long time now. It has been down to business, and Microsoft is good at business. That's it.

What really kills me about the ad-spam being added to menus everywhere is that eventually they start having problems and drag my computer to its knees. I end up with behaviors where the Start Menu takes several seconds to appear, or a search will stall, and when navigating folders in the File Explorer have very serious and noticeable drag, taking one or two seconds. So far I’ve eventually been able to figure out how to turn them off with registry edits and fix the delays, but it seems to be getting harder to do, and MS is definitely omitting controls from the control panel.

It very well may be superficially my fault these things happen, due to customizations or features I’ve enabled or disabled, or software I’ve installed, or due to my company web policies and firewalls, but I have no way to track down the causes. The true culprit though, IMO, is the blurring of the line between application software and operating system. Allowing all these hooks into basic OS functionality seems like a bad idea. It’s crazy that opening the menu to log out or shut down will first go out to the web to scrape some news headlines or shopping suggestions for me, crazy I say!

Install Keypirinha [1] and you don't need the Start menu anymore.

[1]: https://keypirinha.com/

I know I don’t need it, but I want to keep using it. And, I lament that the company I already paid money to for an OS license can’t help itself by putting in so many intrusive advertisements and dark patterns on what is supposed to be just an operating system.

Or use Powertoys Run

It's better than the start menu for sure, but still takes an irritatingly long time to become available after a boot.

At least it's possible to disable all the web search features etc. and have it just open my apps like I wanted.

a lot of windows people i know, dont bother with a proper shut down anymore, they let it run 24-7, or they just hit the power switch and nuke it all instead of waiting.

The idea of shutting off a desktop computer is baffling to me. I guess it's an OCD thing some people have.

You mean as opposed to letting it sleep/hibernate?

A computer running (and not sleeping) while you're asleep or at work is a waste of energy.

Many people waste electricity.

If "not being an irresponsible sociopath" is a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder then just call me Harry Handwasher.

Wow, you've managed to speak derogatorily about both people who waste electricity snd those with OCD. Well done.

And as soon as you're on a subscription-based Windows that has forced auto updates, suddenly you can't just stick to a given version of windows and they can shove whatever they want at you, just like a web service.

This kind of crap is what made Windows 10 unusable for me. Everything was infuriating.

I’m not a fanboy of anything either. Win2K was great. macOS 10.1-10.4 was wonderful. BeOS, RISCOS, IRIX, NeXT, and even DRDOS have warm places in my heart.

These days, I use macOS because I find it the least annoying. It still has too many approval dialogs and notifications, but it isn’t quite as hostile as Windows. Linux and BSD are “fine” but there are other issues that I have with those ecosystems as far as usability is concerned.

I really hope SerenityOS continues its fast paced development and becomes usable for daily computing…

> It still has too many approval dialogs and notifications, but it isn’t quite as hostile as Windows

I’m genuinely intrigued by which approval dialogs and notifications you find so hostile in MacOS?

If it’s SIP or Gatekeeper you’re talking about, there are easily implemented workarounds.

Otherwise I really can’t think of any “notifications” from the OS

I have a MacBook I use occasionally for work. I don't have an AppleID and don't want to make one (same as Microsoft Account). Every time I boot the system, there are about 20 untagged login prompts and have to manually cancel.

That’s interesting. I have a MacBook for work with no Apple ID and I don’t think I’ve ever been asked to sign into anything. I wonder if there are fleet management controls my company is using to disable a lot of that stuff.

Just to provide one example, I definitely have seen macOS pop up notifications advertising that Safari is better than everything else, and I should switch back to Safari.

> Just to provide one example, I definitely have seen macOS pop up notifications advertising that Safari is better than everything else, and I should switch back to Safari.

I would love to see a screenshot because this I simply don’t believe

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/153379/how-do-you-...

I saw it within the past year. I didn’t save a screenshot anywhere I can find. I believe I applied defaults overrides (like in the link) to prevent it from coming back, much like Windows GPO policies.

It's well documented, I saw it at least once a month when logged out of iCloud. Certainly not the most annoying pop-up though, that award goes to the automatic Apple Music launcher when you put on headphones.

This is an old thing they've been doing almost a decade now [0]. It's still around now [1]. You probably never because you either use Safari as your web browser or use it enough for the pop up to not trigger. I don't really get why you think this is unbelievable when Apple will regularly try to get you to use Apple Music, iCloud, etc. Why not Safari?

[0] https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/how-to-osx-try-safari-promotion....

[1] https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/TRYTHENEWSAFARI.html

I got my first Mac a few months ago and there are definitely a few annoying things. Not necessarily (only) popups, just weird error messages, bugs and the system sometimes telling me a jpeg file might be a virus that I may not want to "launch". Though on average I'd say it's a drastically better experience than the current state of Windows.

I’ve been using Mac for 12 years and never seen that dialog about a jpeg being a virus. Are you sure there _isn’t_ anything malicious embedded within the file?

Considering it happens with all files I download onto a USB drive, yes, I'm pretty sure it's not a virus. It seems Mac OS makes all files downloaded like that executable and then assumes it's all viruses.

What are you doing with your machine that makes Windows 10 unusable? I've been on Windows 10 for years. I ran O&O ShutUp 10 a long time ago and haven't had any of the problems people are complaining about. I've had people complain about how they "shouldn't need to run Shutup 10" yeah ok valid point, but it's a weak one because I can make that point about anything on any other OS. It takes what - 10 seconds to run the application?

I'm an advanced power user. There are no pop-ups, no nagging to use Edge, no search feature hostility, no crashes, nothing. Not one day has gone by where I think "wow this OS sucks, why haven't they addressed this issue". I play PC games on it, browse, code, image editing, etc. all without a single hiccup. It's been completely stable and user-friendly. I'm genuinely curious what is it specifically that bothers people about this OS because it sounds like complaining for the sake of complaining and not anything authentic at this point.

I'm a software developer at a FAANG and I use a Windows machine. I listen to my Mac user colleagues complain every week: "my application crashed", "I need to reboot", "I'm forced to update see you in an hour", "I have to shut down so I can reset permissions for this app", etc. They roll their eyes when they notice I'm running Windows, but then endlessly complain about their mac systems. The cognitive dissonance is staggering.

This is my experience with Win 10 as well. In fact I dare say, Win 10 in the past 5 years is one of the best desktop OS's of all time. No crashes, perfect customizability to turn off things, fast and responsive.

However that said, I'm extremely worried about Win 11, and when I saw all the things they changed in the taskbar (no text labels, no option to never combine icons), the right click menu and so on, I was very disappointed. I did get the send to menu back with a thing and I know you can use winaerotweaker to get all the old stuff back, but a part of me wants to be on the native OS stuff whenever possible and not change core OS with third party apps. But I'm also worried about what they might further do in the future and in 5-10 years, incompatibility in programs/etc with Win 10 might make using it very bothersome so you have to update at some point.

You are exaggerating in an attempt to prove your point. Permissions _may_ require restarting the app once. Not weekly. MacOS major updates happen yearly, and minor every few months. Patches often don’t require restart. So that isn’t happening weekly either. Finally, “my application crashed” has absolutely nothing to do with MacOS and everything to do with the application. Nothing ever crashes for me except for Photoshop.

If you’re working for a FAANG you’re probably using a company device, which uses Windows Enterprise. Generally less ad-like, managed by GPO’s, etc. whereas home edition is going to have all these annoyances.

That said they can be tamed or disabled. My wife has a Windows 10 computer (home edition) and it doesn’t prompt her for anything - searches for files are all local, etc. Most of these annoyances are fixed by reading the options when you install the OS. The few that remain are a quick google search away.

I feel like people are over dramatizing this.

This is in the email that microsoftadvertising.com is sending unsolicited to the support email account of one of my sites:

“Microsoft Advertising 88 MILLION new desktop searchers joined last year

Search is at the center of online shopping 88-90% of online shoppers used search. Meanwhile, only 39% used social in their shopping journeys. Two. Most searchers are open to switching brands In fact, 3 out of 4 searchers we studied visited multiple brands' websites while they shopped.

Entice them to buy from your business with Dynamic Search Ads. Three. Online shopping journeys vary greatly On average, 45% of purchase journeys lasted 30+ days. But some, like grocery shopping, lasted only 2 days.

Target ready-to-buy shoppers with In-market audiences.“

I am sorry, but that sounds like a scam. I doubt that it's an actual ms domain.

If it's a scam, it's a damn clever one, because a whois query reveals a domain registered to Microsoft, with azure-dns name servers and a Microsoft contact email.

Also one that's, erm, been flying under the radar for a long time because I've been getting these things for years. Not sure about parent but this is pretty well-known by people who've had to deal with it.

Been looking for ten minutes now and I can't find how to differentiate between Azure customers and Microsoft official websites. Observations:

- the advertising domain is not bought by markmonitor whereas microsoft.com, office.com, and outlook.com all are. Maybe this advertising domain isn't an important enough brand or maybe some other reason. The DNS servers for all four domains are NS1-{0..99}.azure-dns.com, NS2-{0..99}.azure-dns.net, and two other TLDs for NS3 and NS4, and always in the same order

- IP space is all AS8068 and AS8075 (checking the same four domains)

- I tried duckduckgo for "how to differentiate between azure customers and microsoft ip space" but didn't find anyone asking that question anywhere. Probably bad phrasing on my part

- I tried looking for websites hosted by Azure to see if there is an IP space for customers by searching ddg for "powered by azure" and "hosted with azure" but I only get results from Microsoft themselves, random garbage, and things like "azure lessons" that aren't hosted with azure at all (heh)

I would also have expected this to be not-Microsoft-owned and a scam, but I'm failing to prove that hypothesis. That would mean Microsoft is not the company that I thought it was: I thought the difference between Facebook,Google and Microsoft,Apple is that some are in the business of manipulating people and others sell honest products (even if I have other issues with locked-down Apple devices, at least it's not adtech). Looking for revenue streams, I found <https://www.kamilfranek.com/assets/images/microsoft_revenue_...>. So not quite adtech but ads was the biggest growing product last year and has been growing for at least a decade (also based on other sources). Interesting.

It does sound like a scam, but if you've ever tried to use a Microsoft account (I have to sometimes for work) you'll eventually land on a pile of domains that look like scams, and bizarrely want you to type in your password in a UI from the 90s among other things.

(as an aside, I like UIs from the 90s but it's jarring when you fall out of the regular glossy experience into like totallylegitimatemicrosoftazure.com or whatever)

I've used Linux and Windows for more than a decade each. I know about desktop Linux' shortcomings and I was using Windows 10 in the last few years because it worked better than Linux for me. There is just too much stuff going on and performance suffers (especially when dealing with Docker for Windows). It also feels that I'm a guinea pig for PMs at Microsoft to experiment on new revenue generating features, but my operating system is not a place where I would want them. It hurts my focus.

Windows 11 finally sent me back to Linux. Despite a few bugs and annoyances here and there, I'm doing my work on Linux more productively than I was on Windows 11. Time to move on for me.

In the end, it feels like I'm not an important customer to Microsoft anymore (as a "power user"). It feels that their target audience are clueless grandmas that can be easily scammed into their products. I don't want this to sound aggressive. It really does feel that way.

What confuses me is the UI changes every version. If Microsoft's bread and butter are "casual" or "clueless" users, aren't they vulnerable to changes much more than power users?

Maybe M$ PMs don't care about confusing your average grandma who can't find the start menu because it moved to the middle of the taskbar. It's not like granny is going to up and switch to a Mac, is it?

Windows is adware. A couple weeks ago I recently wrote a rant about the reasons I no longer use Windows on any of my machines [1], but I recently installed Windows 10 on bare metal because I have a work project coming up that likely requires me to use Windows. One of the first new obnoxious things I noticed was that search box in the taskbar had a bright and colorful gift icon inside it. Clicking on that icon brings up links to holiday-themed advertisements like "Top 10 Tech Gifts This Holiday Season". Mind you, I provided zero information to Microsoft and had yet to even open a web browser. I also made certain my internet was disconnected prior to the installation setup to avoid being strong armed into creating a Microsoft account, and disabled as much telemetry as they allow beforehand. This was not a dev or beta release, this was the latest version of the Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft's website. It's not just sad, but it gives me a gross feeling.

[1] https://chuck.is/windows

It's truly amazing how Microsoft insists on making Windows worse with each release. It makes me miss the old odd/even releases where at least half of them weren't bad.

Technically Windows 11 is an even release, since Windows 9 was skipped. I, for one, am looking forward to the revolutionary Taskbar with Titles in Windows 12!

They still don’t really have any serious competition, other than macOS (that push you Apple services) and Chromebooks (that push you Google services).

The MS employees who “get” it and actually use stock Windows themselves stopped being in charge.

The key point in that thread is the UI/UX designers don't use Windows and use Macs.

...which explains the disturbing similarity between macOS 13's System Settings and the same in Windows 11.

I suspect the managers and execs also don’t, or only sanitized Windows Enterprise setups, or else they wouldn’t let the designers have free reign here.

Windows will never again reach the pinnacle that was Windows 7. Win 7 was familiar, stable, powerful just get things done OS. RIP.

Don't remind me

I think somewhere around 2K/XP was the pinnacle, Vista was too much graphical bling and bloaty, while 7 toned it back a bit, but 8 is when the decline really started being noticeable.

For UI yes, but I had way too much trouble with x64 driver support in 2000/XP. Win 7 nailed that and just seemed to work for me.

The pinnacle was Windows 2000; none of the releases since then really improved it. (And I say that as someone who thinks the Vista hate is overblown).

I take your point but I had way too much trouble with x64 driver support in 2000/XP. For me win7 was the one that got proper 64 bit driver support and "just worked" fine with a bunch of memory.

Perhaps they're making it worse for people on HN, but better for the average user?

Most average users complain just as much, and are just as unhappy with it. Only reason they stay is learned helplessness and lack of realistic alternatives.

I disagree, I don't see any evidence that regular users are unhappy at all.

That seems very doubtful. I know very few average users who think Windows is getting better, anyway.

But even if it's true, that doesn't make any difference to me. I'm still forced to use it myself.

I love digging into every new version of Windows to find an old NT-era dialog box on some low level setting

It's such a shame because Windows is a good operating system for a lot of desktop use cases that happens to be smeared with shit all over the user interface. Honestly I'm expecting them to introduce mini advertisements in the task bar any time soon. It's not like those pixels are being used for anything when there aren't many windows open right?

The Weather/News Flash taskbar pretty much does this already. Nothing like an angry red triangle warning to keep me up on the latest celebrity news.

So why don't you switch it?

I've put it to show Weather only and I actually like it a lot.

Not who you asked, but my employer won't allow me to change it.

Surely that's just an oversight from whoever set up the group policy, and notifying them should fix it for everyone in your company.

I can't believe that right click Menu has has "more" option which shows basic features of that context menu, like what the fuck? what's even the reasoning with this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN-WEBd8obc

But select text and search in browser option seems to be really reasonable.

Just wait for ads in the right click menu.

Is there a version of Windows that lets you pay your way out of this bullshit? I may need a Windows machine for work next year and this shit is terrifying. I haven't touched Windows since around 2006 so I'm not familiar with their offerings. They used to have a consumer and a professional edition of Windows in the olden days with the latter being far less annoying.

The policy editor should let you disable most (all?) of these things. It comes with the pro edition I think.

You can use stuff like https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10

Wouldn't Pro versions of Windows don't have this mess?

No, they still have these features on Pro and even HPC SKUs of Client. Server and LTSB don't, but are missing other features you might actually want (like DirectX).

Win 10 Pro with Open Shell and auto updates off is quite pleasant.

If it is a Windows machine provided from a workplace with IT then it should be a Windows Enterprise image where this stuff is disabled with Group policy or Intune.

Don't bother with cleaning script, they can fuck things up, and the benefit is questionable, as it's a whack-a-mole basically. Windows 11 is not a hard requirement, and I don't think it will be in the coming few years, so I went with Windows 10 LTSC. Lots of useless crap is cut from it, so no Cortana, no Store, no Edge even, and no feature updates. There are security updates however! So it's a nice, stable, useful edition, with no downsides for gaming.

Real businesses will not put up with this nonsense and that's why LTSC exists.

I'm also wondering if you can just run server editions.

I don't think businesses care too much. LTSC is for when you need the system to not change over time, but still get some security updates, not simply business use - for that, there's the Enterprise edition of course.

Annoyingly LTSC costs around $300ish for the typical end user and has an inordinate amount of hoops just to buy it... makes it difficult to recommend to family so I curse them with Arch instead.

I personally run my own activation server (https://github.com/Wind4/vlmcsd), and just point the Windows installation there. Or you can use one of the many servers that are floating around the internet. Either way, it's a bit annoying unfortunately.

Also, my country's second hand electronics market has LTSC keys for sale for like $25. That might be worth looking into.

I've seen that stuff floating around and it brings me back to my warez days. I've put that behind me though and I just want an honest relationship now and I'm consistently finding that in the open source community, it's like a breath of fresh air.

>I just want an honest relationship now and I'm consistently finding that in the open source community, it's like a breath of fresh air.

I share these feelings deeply. Furthermore, what Microsoft (and other large tech companies) put people through via their systems, feels like an abusive relationship to me. FOSS, for the most part, aligns much closer to my idea of computation. A kernel of deep contempt remained in me however, from my old days of using, and hacking, my Windows system which just never worked long in the way I wanted it to. And I remember reading news on Microsoft proposals such as "Trusted Computing", where the idea was that Windows would scan your files when they are being opened, to determine if it's a legitimate copy and refuse to work with it if it's not approved[0]. That was such an outrageous idea to me back in mid 2000s that it cemented in me that I won't give Microsoft any money. Which of course softened, over the years, I bought second hand Windows licenses for computers I set up for others, for example, but still... the one installation I have to keep around for gaming, will never be a legitimate copy as long as I can manage.

For added fun, the KMS emulator I'm using is open source, and runs on Linux :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing#Digital_righ...

If what your need is LTSC, why is Arch rolling update fine? What about RHEL clone or Debian for stability?

Well, they wrote "curse".

Exactly, businesses need this thing to get out of the way and just remain consistent. Turns out there's a lot of people that want exactly the same thing and we are not getting it any more.

Windows 10 'LTSC' sounds like what you want, I used it for some client projects.

The LTS release was meant for Kiosk and pseudo embedded applications but was pretty much a non hostil UX version of Windows 10. In comparison even Windows 10 Professional editions are very bloated.

I am not sure if they intend to have an analogue Windows 11 LTS but I suppose the need will probably be there for customers who are more Windows-centric.

You could try Windows Server 2022

After years of thinking "wsl2 is enough for me", I switched to fedora as an experiment and I have not looked back once.

Welcome to the fold, friend. Stoked to see another soul has seen through the smokescreen.

Yes, I’ve always thought that OS discussions needs more tribalism.

If you can't understand the difference between solidarity and tribalism, that's something you should work on.

If you can't understand the political, philosophical and sociological nuances of selecting between Windows and Linux as computing environments, and why this is more than just a simple UI preference, that's something you should work on.

Sarcasm is also something you should work on.

See you next time.

I'm not the person you responded to, and I would never have replied with sarcasm as they did, but "Stoked to see another soul has seen through the smokescreen" comes across as more tribal than solidarity, IMO, if those are the only two options.

Did you read the article? It's about how Microsoft is gaslighting the user about the future of computing. There is absolutely a smokescreen in place, which the majority of Linux-based distributions do not employ.

For me, Manjaro, and later (purely out of masochism) Arch. :)

I did "look back" for certain AAA games that either don't work on Linux or DO work but their launcher doesn't (e.g., Blizzard), but AAA game companies have done me the solid of hypercommercializing themselves into unbearable mediocrity. So, even if I want to play one of those games now, I'm not too hurried to wait for a few years so Proton support makes it available (plus you get it cheaper, with bugfixes, all DLCs, and your hardware can run it better).

just as a heads up, the blizzard launcher works fine. there was a short period it didn't due to some bug, that they fixed on their end for the Linux community.

I play wow, ow2 and such just fine from the launcher. so give it a try again if you've been avoiding it.

I overwrote Windows 10 and installed Fedora last year.

I just love Gnome.

Gnome has really surprised me (in a good way). I was really just looking to have a better dev experience since I use containers so extensively. But the UI is really pleasant to look at and intuitive. I particularly enjoy not having to disable ads and other nuisances that Microsoft keeps throwing onto the pile.

I tried this with Ubuntu a few years ago. Once I had to deal with hidpi issues and screen tearing while scrolling in Firefox, I went back.

Get an AMD graphics card and use wayland.

Kind of interesting how 4k displays have been common for close to a decade now and it’s still an issue in many Linux environments.

This is me, a few weeks ago. WSL2 feels so hobbled in comparison, now that I'm on the other side again.

Linux Gaming cannot come fast enough.

I'm so ready to uninstall Windows on my only Windows machine which happened to be a gaming computer, however there are just a few games that I want to play from time to time that does not support Linux.

For now I can live with Windows 10 which had a workable WSL so I can pretend that windows have a terminal (Some modding needs code!)

I will say myself personally, that after I got my steam deck I haven't turned on my desktop in 6 months. Slowly in the process of converting my windows desktop into a media server. My two laptops are not windows machines.

I have't looked at the steam surveys but I hope there's enough users to encourage more publishers to make games linux compatible.

I know for me personally, all the games I enjoy are available for linux gaming. Even "recent" titles like Spiderman and God of War.

Too bad if you're interested in playing Age Of Empires 2 and older titles like Medieval Total War...

There are some concern about graphics performance as well, it seems most titles are not tuned for Linux. Do you have the same graphic performance under linux?

Linux can play pretty much anything under Proton now. And older games tend to work better than on Windows because Proton runs the actual code instead of trying to force it through the current windows OS that is 10 versions on and doesn't have any of the APIs anymore. A lot of old windows games don't even run on windows anymore.

Thanks, I might need to try that, does Proton require SteamOS or I could use any linux flavor I like?

As long as it can run Steam. Steam on Linux has Proton built in.

There's no particular distro preference. If you can install Steam on it, Proton is also likely to work. Steam's SteamOS is Arch based (btw), used to be Debian based. Steam games used to target Ubuntu, I can't find the sources for this, but I remember seeing it as a target. LTS versions usually.

I personally had good experience with either Mint Cinnamon, Debian (with KDE), Fedora and Manjaro, so it's pick your poison, really. For support reasons, I suggest a popular distro.

You can use any distro you like. I'm using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and have basically the same experience as most people on ProtonDB. The thing to remember is that to use Proton for games that Valve hasn't verified, you have to go into your Steam settings and under Steam Play check "Enable Steam Play for all other titles".

I have noticed that some games work better or worse under different versions of Proton, though.

Just install the steam client and enable compatibility. I always set it to forced experimental to use the most up to date version of proton

What's the problem with AoE II? It's rated gold on https://www.protondb.com/app/221380 and runs fine for me under Proton.

There's a definitive edition now that everyone plays and it also happens to be from literally Microsoft themselves..

And that definitive edition is listed as gold on ProtonDB.

Well now you guys have given me no excuse, RIP Windows on my gaming desktop 2019-2022.

AoE runs fantastic. Controls are an obvious issue but you can connect up a keyboard and mouse

Windows as a curated platform is a lost case at this point. They probably don't make enough money from it to justify investment.

Their market is the enterprise world where they have a lock in, plus gamers and PC users who cannot afford a Mac. It shows.

Not a problem for me. I have no issue using a bad OS if a company is paying me for using it, and at home I don't use Windows.

I don't use a Mac because they're overpriced. The new CPUs are interesting but the rest of it can go do one.

One thing to consider is resale value. When I tried reselling old Windows laptops like a Surface or XPS, the value dropped off a cliff from the MSRP. I would spend $2000 on a laptop and then it was selling for $700 used on ebay a year later.

With MacBooks (and other Apple products) you can often recoup 70%-80% of your initial cost as long as it's in good condition.

If it's not a base-model. If you're one of the unlucky shmucks running an 8/256 M1 Macbook Pro, you'll be lucky to get $500 for it on the secondhand market.

Swappa shows that you can get much more. The current average sale price for a Macbook Air, M1, 256GB is $673 respectively. Compared to the $1000 MSRP you're getting about 67% back.

Note that Swappa takes a 3% cut, so the buyer would actually see around ~$650.

https://swappa.com/guide/macbook-air-2020-13/prices

It gets even better. I got my M1 Airs (base model) for like $850 arg (two at $950, 2 at $750 - all brand new).

They're still great little machines - like my still-running 2010 Air (so retro I keep it around for kicks) - I expect these to last pretty much forever.

Great for the kids/elderly when configured properly. Minimal support effort. My kids treat them like their Nintendos and they just work.

I don't tend to upgrade machines all that often. My current laptop is two years old that I maxed out with 128GB RAM and oodles of storage so I won't need to consider upgrading for at least 5 more years at least.

The Macs are somewhat overpriced (especially the upsells for more RAM and storage), but I'd still consider one once you can get rid of the horrible operating system that comes with it and Asahi Linux works fully (external monitor/Thunderbolt dock support is what I'm most interested in).

No one seriously games on a Mac.

Parse error:

> Their market is the enterprise world where they have a lock in, plus gamers and PC users who cannot afford a Mac. It shows.

Their market is:

1) The enterprise world, where they have a lock in.

2) Gamers.

3) PC users who cannot afford a Mac.

This is why the oxford comma is important.

Also, PC users who prefer the (classic) Windows UI over macOS.

For the love of god, if anyone from the windows design team is looking at this, give us taskbar on the side with ungrouped icons and titles, and fix the autohide. It is painful to use windows on laptops without it. That's been my windows setup for over a decade and it was straight up removed from win11 whilst calling it an "upgrade".

I have hope for Linux running on more desktops now that I've seen Proton in action. But there's still things here and there that stop me from switching, even if every game I want to play runs flawlessly.

One of the biggest issues is peripherals. None of the manufacturers write their software to work on Linux and they don't make their protocols open so others can easily do the work instead. Reverse engineering works to an extent, but that requires significant effort. I'm not going to be okay with losing functionality of my hardware.

Last time I checked, the HRTF options were also lacking on Linux. Meanwhile there's multiple choices on Windows (I'm currently enjoying SteelSeries Sonar) including built-in support for object-based 3D audio with multiple renderer options.

And the latest killer for me is lack of HDR support. I have an HDR monitor and I'm not going to settle for running it in SDR mode. I'm not even sure I'd want to switch if Linux supported HDR but didn't have an equivalent of Auto HDR (which I think does a decent job at scaling the luma of SDR games outside of the SDR range)

Windows Start Menu is a PITA, can't count how many times it doesn't find installed programs.

It was much better when it didn't try to be smart.

Startallback has been a revelation

> Windows Start Menu is a PITA

Slow as molasses.

I just use it like Windows 98 and scroll through the list to find the program. It works.

Windows 10, unless things change will be my last windows machine. I use it for testing with msvc, and my tax software that i like. But all this imposition into software i paid for isn't how i want to use my computers. Like Windows is pretty solid, it is MS by doing this has lost all credibility as a company that views me as their customer. I don’t need them

Well, how much are you willing to pay for Windows?

Consumers already spoke with their wallets: they don't want to buy OSes. They're expected to be free.

The only reason macOS isn't this aggressive about advertising is because it's locked down to profitable hardware and linked together with a proprietary ecosystem of even-more-profitable hardware.

Diving into these, I still think this article is a bit dramatic.

1. Recommended Websites: Do you even look at your start menu? I don't. I hit the Windows key and type in the first few letters of the app I'm trying to open. The Start Menu could be completely blank and I wouldn't care.

2. Search Highlights: You don't even need to have a search bar in your taskbar at all

3. Suggested Actions: Can be turned off entirely

4. Warnings in the wrong places: Easily ignorable text in another piece of UI I never look at.

5. Please use our search filled with ads: Again, remove the search icon from your taskbar. It doesn't have to be there at all.

Don't want any of this? Install Linux.

What about using a custom shell on Windows 11? I remember using LiteStep, bbLean and geoShell on my old Windows 98 and XP. If they are no longer developed, this might be a niche market for Windows 11 users who are tired of constant "improvements". I bet some users would be very happy with "classic" Windows 7 shell too.

Part of the problem is that MS made it harder to replace the shell with every version

Edit: Although apparently "Open Shell" can replace the Windows 10 start menu, so I guess it's not impossible.

You can, for example using Shell Launcher: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/kios...

But people usually prefer replacing just the Start menu, or just making tweaks to how the regular task bar works.

Microsoft is a services company. Expect only more of this.

By the way, Apple is also a services company.

The difference here is that most of Apple’s customers want to use at least some of their services.

The EU Digital Services Act (article 25) bans dark patterns for online platforms: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:...

What a shame it doesn't straightforwardly apply to operating systems

Between the adds infiltrating every part of the os and the arbitrary decision to not allow my computer to run windows 11 (no TPM, though it is plenty fast) I have had enough. I've daily driving Linux for 7-8 years with only occasional windows use. There are certainly some rough edges with Linux, but it is perfectly workable.

I installed Windows 11 last week, disabled all personalization/tracking/ads settings I could find and I don't think I've noticed any ads whatsoever.

It's a sad day indeed when you pay for an OS that you then have to manually opt out of targeted ads and tracking.

TPM2.0 is required because it allows for running of encrypted binaries and microsoft will need that feature to ensure people can't modify away any user hostile features.

Windows is still my favourite OS, but I surely am not rushing to adopt Windows 11 beyond work requirements.

It is just another Vista.

> Windows is still my favourite OS

Now there's an unpopular opinion if anything. I've heard the "yeah it's kind of shit, but the games/applications I use only really work with Windows" a million times, but this one is kind of new.

Edit: this comment was indeed intended to be read in the context of HN crowd.

Unpopular in HN and FOSS circles.

You don't know anyone that prefers Windows? It sounds like you're a bit out-of-touch.

Anyone who is familiar with Windows is going to prefer it over the alternative which, in reality, the only alternative that most people would use is macOS. People in my life who prefer Windows include:

* Pretty much anyone who went to school with me K-12, since that's what we primarily used

* Anyone who was in my CS program in college since we were expected to use Windows machines, and most graduates when on to companies where devs used Windows

* Anyone at any of my previous jobs who wasn't in a developer role (save the rare manager who has strong preferences)

* Anyone who play video games on a desktop aside from those who are technically inclined

I personally prefer macOS/Linux. I use Windows when I have to. Most people find Windows to be fine. Regardless of validity, I rarely hear non-tech people complain about the issues with Windows that HN rants about.

A bit of an aside, but CS and software engineering programs should be based on FOSS to the greatest extent possible, with proprietary software only being used when necessary. The idea that CS programs would use Windows or macOS by default is pretty horrifying to me.

It depends on your view on the program. If your goal is to produce graduates who are successful in the workforce you'd be doing them a grave disservice by having them use FOSS (e.g. a Linux-based OS).

My CS program was almost entirely FOSS and I turned out OK in the workforce, as did most of my classmates.

"kind of shit" - in what way? I'm dying to hear an intelligent complaint come from somebody because so far everything I'm reading (for Windows 10 at least) are mob mentality pitch-forky type of comments. You can read my comment on it to another post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33946821

Take Windows 10 or 11 through a time machine and show it to someone in the 90s or 00s and it would be considered adware and/or malware and/or spyware. It takes every opportunity to shove ads in the user's face. It takes days of configuration to make it usable, and an update at any time can undo your efforts as shown by other comments in this thread. Unless you complete a metaphorical Ninja Warrior course every little bit of your data will be sent to Microsoft, and even if you do everything right there still are telemetry that you can't disable. The UI is often laggy and unresponsive compared to eg. Manjaro XFCE.

Linux may have issues at times but at least they're not caused by malice. An OS should get out of my way and let me do what I need / want to do, not do everything it can to intentionally and maliciously get in my way to make a few cents of adverts. Modern Windows is parasitic.

I can at least provide you with my usual favourites. I use Windows on my work computer and Linux on personal.

1. Auto updates. Get a pop up every 1-2 hours reminding you that by the next morning the computer will restart. If you do it now, you get rid of the pop up, but will spend the next 15 minutes waiting for the update to apply. If you forget about it, you will find all your programs closed the next morning. This never happens on Linux, although I don't know how much of this is due to the laptop being a company one.

2. Customizability: I wanted to customize the keyboard layout to my own preference. Could not do it. In Linux it was 5 mins on Google and one config file edit. Don't even care to think how this changes when one wants to start customizing further.

3. No tabs on file browser or power shell/cmd. This one is the most baffling one, such a low-hanging fruit to improve UX.

4. Microsoft data collection from usage: more of a theoretical concern to me, but still doesn't make me like it any better.

5. I'm not a fan of the office tools you're forced to use with corporate Windows: for some language reason outlook refuses to believe that I want to write "to the" and not "tot he", even if I explicitly tell it not to correct it. And unfortunately Excel is the de-facto standard for office spreadsheets. It has a rather primitive way to handle dates and can't open files with more than some 1 million or so lines. I can't help but think that if MS didn't have such a monopoly on office software, we would have similar variety and quality as we see for IDEs in spreadsheet software.

The last point is not exactly better in any other OS, but it still is a firmly Windows thing, so I feel it's justified to be added to the list.

Ah, lastly, using Linux I can be pretty comfortable that my OS experience will stay more or less the same for years to come. If bit, just change the distro to something relatively similar. Not so much with Windows. So far I haven't read a single positive thing about W11, and would like to hear your thoughts on having ads and whatever else you have to put up with when you're forced to do the switch.

It is also my preferred OS. It’s familiar and everything I need is there. I don’t need a Unix command line as I prefer an OO shell and I’ve never once have had to interact with the underlying kernel for any programming that I do.

I ran Fedora for 4 years and it was a mess of gnome crashing due to memory leaks or trying to find a hacky way of getting some program installed that I needed. Sacrificing real outlook and office applications only hurt my ability to do my job as well.

> It is just another Vista.

Not really. Vista was overly ambitious, and because of that, it had had many problems which were later fixed in Win7. Modern audio, networking, display driver model, 64-bit, drive encryption etc have all been released with Vista, and most of that code still runs on Win11. Vista was only immature, nothing was wrong with it otherwise. Win7 is what Vista should have been.

Windows 11, on the other hand, only brings some UI and small performance and security improvements over Win10. It's nowhere close to Vista. Old Microsoft would have called this Win10.11 rather than Win11.

Windows 11 is the reboot of Windows 10X, after the Surface Neo got canceled.

"How Windows 10X runs UWP and Win32 apps"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztrmrIlgbIc

You're missing the infrastructure rebuilding that is taking place to bring all that UWP pluming back into Win32 and COM, without App Identity and sandboxing, so that eventually one day they can drop legacy UWP from Windows, and have Windows Runtime being just another COM based framework.

So they have to undo about 10 years of pushing UWP, back into standard Win32 + COM infrastructure.

Most of Vista's problems was the nvidia driver. It would cause long freezes. Once that got fixed, it ran quite well.

"Vista was bad, 7 was good, 8 was bad, 10 was good, 11 is bad...". I don't expect the next version, or any after that, to be good again.

Lots of people have told me (not to me specifically of course) that paying for software was the magic thing that would rid software of ads. But isn’t Windows a payed-for product? It seems more likely that such organizations will do whatever they can get away with.

Another example is Spotify with their podcasts suggestions (that you can’t get rid of). Why would I, who is not from America, want to listen to the wife of a former American president?

"Paid" is a spectrum. Hulu has paid (with ads) and paid (pay more to remove ads). Windows is probably being sold at a loss, and ads make up the difference. So no, it isn't enough to stuff a dollar in Microsoft's shirt pocket and expect to not see ads.

My new gaming build is Linux-only, PopOS to be precise, and the experience so far has been smooth. AMD CPU and NVIDIA GPU and stuff just works. And thanks to Valve's investments, all the games that I care about just work, too. I'm also pretty sure that no upcoming triple-A game is going to ignore Linux, now that all the cool kids with money bought a Steam Deck.

Do you know of any alternatives to Playnite? I use that and GameActivity to try and track my play time.

The best feature in Windows 11 I've seen so far is the downgrade feature; after I gave it a spin and found the new taskbar to be intolerable the revert to Windows 10 was remarkably painless!

Windows is in the business of selling software to business clients (And slowly migrating to being a cloud provider business).

The only reason Windows happens to have 'home' editions and pervasive software in schools is to perpetuate the 'familiarity' argument when Businesses are doing procurement.

I see ‘secure’ laptops at F500 companies now that have search ads in the start menu.

How did IT not push back against MS here?

Huge security issue.

Windows enterprise is a different product. SysAdmins can likely push a GPO update to disable internet searches and other queries to Microsoft.

If you see “secure” laptops with ads and searching bing enabled by default, it’s likely their sysadmins are either lazy or have a different threat model.

For all those who stay on Windows only for games, google for vfio it's a virtual machine with Windows for games Uses a dedicated graphics card, has like 3% cost.

Bonus is you don't have to care about updates and viruses/trojans. Disk C with OS is just a raw file, that you can copy at will.

What is the cost when it comes to disk I/O? I found the overhead to be significant in VMs. Personal impression, no metrics. I am also talking about standard OS-based VMs where the image is a file, not hypervisors.

It is becoming more and more relevant now that we have ridiculously fast SSDs and games take advantage of them. It was, after all, a big selling point of the PS5.

you can pass-through a whole additional nvme ssd if you find a normal "raw file as partition" on your ssd isn't enough for you.

PS use virtio driver for a "raw file disk" for best speed. PPS Basically qemu-kvm/libvirt on Linux is a go-to solution for games.

I maintain a tiling window manager for Windows[1]. It's the only thing still keeping me on Windows right now. I run NixOS on WSL, and I have a separate NixOS desktop partition that I iterate on from time to time.

Once I can make my tiling window manager X11-compatible, I think that will be it for me and Windows. The last update totally screwed me to the extent that I had to go into the registry and manually set my user profile path to get all my settings back, all because the update couldn't handle a symlink in the C:\Users dir, which I had to use because there is no sane way to do something as simple as changing the user directory name.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

Genuine question, but what's wrong with the tiling window managers already available for Linux?

They are all beautiful works of software, but nothing can really compare to the seamless experience of using a tool that you have designed to meet all of your needs from the ground-up.

This is the downside of building your own tools (well)- once you have experienced how good life can be with those tools, it's very hard to go back to working with tools that are not designed with all of the same intricacies in mind.

While I don't use the tool (I use Windows Power Toys for my tiled window management) I have to give a shout out on the amazing github readme. That is lovingly complete and I wasn't left wondering how any of it worked.

Thank you! Usually the only feedback that I get on the README is that it is "too long", so I really appreciate this comment. :)

These are the least of the abuse that history shows us you should expect.

But, this Sunday afternoon, you can burn this Debian installer to a USB stick, use it, and be mostly done with MS forever:

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in...

(I did that a couple decades ago, and still haven't regretted it. I regret many tech choices over that time, but I don't regret moving from MS to an honest Linux distro.)

This can all be summarized as: Microsoft is going down market.

Of course if Apple starts with this stuff they too will start going down market and open an opportunity for someone else to own the high end.

If I pay for it it better not have ads. If something I pay for starts adding ads I cancel.

This. A services company is inherently downmarket. Easy positioning for MS, but Apple's eyeing becoming a services company too, which fights against their high end hardware business' demands.

The horrifying descent of Windows is one of the great tragedies of our time. It's never been great, but it's generally been OK. This is monstrous.

Every single exec involved in this should be publicly named and shamed, and driven out of the tech industry.

Sorry for an emotional expletive-laden post here, but this enrages me so much. My computer is my main professional and creative tool, and for MS to do this shit without my permission or control (like it already does with fucking Edge and OneDrive nags every time it installs an update) feels so exploitative, greedy, and evil.

And stupid - their execs are chasing myopic short term gains with aggressive stongarm tactics, while long-term I and probably a million others are running for the exit, and doing our best to never use Windows, Azure, Outlook, Office etc again.

So few companies out there seen to care about their long term reputation.

> while long-term I and probably a million others are running for the exit, and doing our best to never use Windows, Azure, Outlook, Office etc again. So few companies out there seen to care about their long term reputation.

Sadly, the number of people who will actually run for the exit is much, much smaller. People on HN are completely unrepresentative of the general population. I'm pretty sure MS has people who do user retention as part of design research, it is standard in the industry before rolling out a feature to all users. Especially when switching costs are high, even people who hate ads get used to them after a very short time. Plus, everyone who can afford a Mac and doesn't mind being locked-in to the Apple ecosystem is already there.

Every mainstream platform is already inundated with ads. Social media is full of ads and sponsored posts. Most 'news' sites have gotten so bad that content is only 25-50% of the screen. E-commerce marketplaces from Amazon to Walmart are compromised and corrupted. People may run from one ad-saturated platform or site to another, but the norm is ads everywhere. If they're not running from that, would they notice or care about this?

Well we're often the ones who recommend a computer to our parents and grandparents. Or the ones who decide which cloud hosting platform or email service provider to use in our organizations.

People and governments are collectively getting fed up with surveillance capitalism.

One can hope.

Well, I remember how 10 years ago tons of HN users were posting about how they changed the browser on all of their relatives and friends computer to Chrome. How did that end up?

Chrome became the most popular browser in the market. (Unfortunately with its own issues.)

It took me a while to abandon the Microsoft ecosystem for my own use but I'm so glad that I did. It was a lot of careful considerations though and finding out what was important to me and how other open source projects aligned with those goals.

I'm thinking maybe a site that has a way for users to pick things that matter to them and then recommend an OS and software would be a good idea.

This article was 50 percent ads.

What’s interesting is that MS is doing things that the EU already gave substantial fine for making a browser default.

> Sadly, the number of people who will actually run for the exit is much, much smaller.

Doesn't matter as long as the number is growing. As it grows, more people will tell others that they switched and it's better. It's slow to start but eventually it becomes unstoppable. I think Microsoft will keep the business desktop but they will lose the home desktop. When that happens, Eventually, games won't even be made for Windows anymore, like Macs today.

Microsoft transitioning Windows into a spyware platform filled with advertisements and garbage has been in the making for years at this point. Its absolutely exploitative, greedy, and evil, which is why if you can you should consider switching to a different operating system, like Linux. At the very least you can transition to using Linux for tasks that work on Linux while keeping around Windows for tasks which require windows, either due to a lack of Linux support or poor performance/stability/etc. All of this assuming you aren't doing this already.

i used to do all sorts of stuff with Windows XP/2000 (like sysprepping reg-tweaked/debloated/pre-loaded Windows ISOs for myself). but now i have fully moved away from Windows to EndeavourOS/KDE and haven't looked back; many others have jumped ship to PoP_OS. yes, you do have to slightly limit/research your hardware options to get a great experience, but i've always been an AMD GPU guy (due to their better thermals / power efficiency), and all of my laptops are Thinkpads w/Intel wifi, so take this with those grains of salt.

i do miss Foobar2000 and HeidiSQL (DeaDBeeF and DBeaver aren't quite as polished), and Affinity products are hard to get running without glitches in Wine/Proton, but otherwise it's been fantastic. though i've had to fiddle quite a bit with Chromium and MPV settings to enable GPU hardware acceleration for video decoding.

first straw was slow filesystem access due to Windows Defender, last straw was unstoppable Windows updates full of ad garbage and apps i previously removed with various debloating scripts. i ran Windows 10 with these addons to get back a more Windows XP experience:

disable TPM v2.0 (keep it at v1.2) to forever prevent Windows 11 upgrades: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-o...

debloat: https://github.com/farag2/Sophia-Script-for-Windows. there's also LTSC, but it's basically impossible to purchase an actual license, so you have to pirate it: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/l...

start menu: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

taskbar: https://ramensoftware.com/7-taskbar-tweaker

search: https://goffconcepts.com/products/filesearchex/index.html

archives: https://www.7-zip.org/

task manager: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pro...

Notepad replacement: https://github.com/rizonesoft/Notepad3

Linux is a usability mess, and has been for 20 years. I give a new shot once every other year.

Basic flow:

  - Works out of the box for a basic desktop
  - Once you start installing drivers and software outside the package manager (Which you'll need to do immediately) and doing C+P CLI workarounds, the system state starts decaying, and things break.
  - The easiest way to fix things is usually a clean OS reinstall, in the sense of a car "total".

What drivers? You don't need to install any drivers if everything works.

My computer ran well with Linux with one display after instaing Linux. Then I tried to use a second, daisy chained, Displayport display. And the mess began. Confusing tips on forums, confusing and experimental drivers to install... And so on. Didn't manage to get it running.

The thing with Linux is it gets blamed for lack of vendor support. If something doesn't work with Linux it's Linux's fault, if something doesn't work with windows it's the vendors fault. That's never seemed fair to me. Those confusing and experimental drivers you mention are unlikely to be provided by the vendor and are likely a volunteer's best efforts to reverse engineer the driver

As a counter point my old wireless canon printer works flawlessly out of its old box with Linux but getting it to work on windows 10 is full of confusing tips on forums, confusing and experimental drivers to install. Nightmare.

My point isn't about who's at fault; it's the result.

Seemingly just for you.

This is manipulative and in bad faith.

Like your replies then.

In this case (it's was couple of years ago) it was a beta release by the manufacturer.

Thing is, to me as an end user it doesn't matter who's at fault, if it doesn't work it doesn't work and I'm only so motivated to investigate something (functionality wise) basic not working while on Windows all the basics run fine but the advanced stuff creates problems. With Linux on desktop I never arrived at the advanced stuff giving up at (some of) the basic stuff not working out of the box.

But I fully understand, from a technical standpoint drivers and daisy chained display probably aren't basic and Windows has hidden als the complexity from me for the last 20 years.

The GPU drivers tend to be proprietary.

Both AMD and Intel have open source drivers upstreamed into the Linux kernel (and are the vendor recommended ones, outside of certain enterprise use cases).

It's really only NVIDIA that's proprietary.

Only nvidia's. And and Intel are open and included in the kernel.

AMD*

What nonsense is this? While I admit that Linux has real usability issues which none of what you wrote is remotely true.

Rings true for me, I'm about at the reinstall stage with my HTPC. It will no longer send audio via HDMI due to some deep obscure pipewire config that broke itself without me touching anything. It also no longer connects to my Bluetooth keyboard on 2/3 of the keyboard's channels (actually it connects and disconnects very rapidly, several times a second, but is unusable regardless).

Usability of Linux desktop environments isn't perfect but at least the trend is steady improvement. The days of having to do weird stuff just to make some everyday USB device work when you plug it in are mostly gone. The software available for Linux in a few areas is now genuinely best in class. It's not always the same exact applications you might be used to but then that's true of moving between Windows and macOS as well.

My own experience of modern Linux is very different to yours. I don't think I've had to completely clean and reinstall any Linux system I use - desktop or server - for over a decade. Some of those systems have been through multiple full OS upgrades in that time but those were done in place and usually without losing anything (or gaining anything unwanted).

It's obviously not perfect. Some of the recent Wayland changes got released by some distros before some of the applications that do video calls were fully ready for them and that caused problems with remote working for example. But it's paradise compared to the danger of installing any modern version of Windows or any Apple OS and getting serious regressions or overtly user-hostile new "features" that you can't turn off.

I do think there's room for a modern desktop OS that doesn't have all the historical baggage of Linux. Not having a permissions model that sandboxes apps and the data they work with by default seems very outdated in 2022 for example. The traditional filesystem hierarchy is unnecessarily complicated and not well suited to modern systems. We rely on container technologies for professional work now because the package management and installation/update mechanics are so fragile (though no worse than Windows or macOS IMHO). I just wish the barriers to entry weren't so high now that it is tough for anyone to build a new desktop OS from the ground up any more.

First point true. What's an advanced desktop consist of?

Second point false, unless you're using something obscure and/or one of the pure only open source variants.

Third point. This is down to experience. But when you do decide to do a full reinstall it's done in about 5 minutes. Can't complain about that!

A lot of your "problems" are because you've spent years buying "Windows" devices indiscriminately. If you had been buying things that were known to be compatible with Linux, you'd have no problems getting them to work.

You didn't state which distro or package manager you were dealing with but there is a LOT more third-party support for DEB packages than the others, so that may also be why you had problems.

It's unclear that Microsoft providing up-to-date guidance on the continued leverage of various professional features included with your Windows license qualifies as "nagging". I would double-check if you actually have experienced this.

I know I probably sound like a broken record, but Linux really is quite nice these days. I personally find it miles better than Windows. It is even decent for gaming, thanks to Steam’s work on proton.

So, depending on your use case, you might be able to make the switch without any significant drawbacks.

FWIW, I say this as a former Microsoft employee and heavy promoter of their ecosystem for the first 15 years of my career.

One of the many reasons I don't use Windows for anything but gaming (and even then, I'm keeping my gaming machine on 10 as long as I can)

Make a deal with a demon and it will come around to bite you in the ass every single time. They've written instructional parables about this stuff for thousands of years.

Learn from the ancient wisdom. Say no to demons.

And sadly, there is no reason to believe other companies will not end up going down the same road.

Hence we should fight for open hardware.

I feel like Win 11 is a solid product from an engineering and even an UI/UX perspective, ruined by awful marketing decisions.

Why would you pay for this? Why would you even associate with a company who will not even sell you, a private individual, an option that does not include this?

What about using Linux on the desktop is "difficult" enough to justify paying money to Microsoft for voluntary software servitude?

* They will not tell you what data they collect about you

* They will not allow you to disable data collection

* They will not permit you to define the default browser you use

* They will not permit you to avoid advertisements disguised as valid system alerts

* They will delete your privacy settings without notification

* They will lock down your hardware so you physically can't install or modify the software

> Why would you pay for this?

Most people don't. They are reusing their windows 7 license from that one computer they got in 2010 or their windows 8 license they got for free in college.

Or they do not consider it "buying" it, as it was "free" with their computer.

> They will not permit you to define the default browser you use

They might reset it on updates once a year or something (it hasn't happened to me, but I heard others were not as fortunate) but you definitely can set it, right?

At my last employer, I built a thing that let us target warnings on various pages of the admin about the user’s configuration. Things like “hey you don’t have backups turned on and this is the fifth post you’ve made.”

It was incredibly fine-grained. Then the marketers got a hold of it, which is fine because surely they’d understand targeted ads. Nah. 75% of people just slapped a message on the user’s homepage, whether they could use the feature or not.

Seeing basically the same thing being built for windows settings makes me sigh. Mostly because people don’t have the ability or disciple to use it correctly.

I'm just not having any of the problems people are experiencing and I'm on the latest Win 11 (22H2). It hasn't changed my file associations or popped up, or stolen focus, or advertised anything to me and it gives me valuable information about how long my computer will be inaccessible if I update it, and lets me choose when. I replace the task bar (explorer patcher) and start menu (open-shell) and I have "do not disturb" on constantly, if that helps anyone. Windown and I just leave each other alone.

I'm not trying to call anyone out. I'm sure the negative experiences are genuine. However, it's worth pointing out Microsoft made some progress in improving things for some users, despite shockingly poor choices (task bar, I'm looking at you), and dark patterns for some users. It's still the closest thing to the "best" OS for a personal computer, depending on what things are important to you in the moment. I want that to be GNU/Linux/BSD but for me the FOSS OS' are just too distracting (always some sort of config chore needing to be done to address screen tearing, or why the touchpad won't work, or how to get the bluetooth stack working, or how to keep the configs in sync between machines, or how to reliably store and back up my files). It's an unfair playing field.

I used a GNU/Linux flavor (debian -> Ubuntu -> OpenSuse -> Arch) as my primary OS for around 5 years, before the build up of cortisol became too much.

I would have rather stuck with ballmer. His worst was better than this.

I assure you that Ballmer would at the very forefront of aping the latest disreputable, scummy dark patterns while missing the point and forcing tasteless, trashy, ineffectual money grabs that do much to waste your time and little to benefit Microsoft or anybody else.

I know, I was there, but they didn't fuck with the basics.

But they wanted to. Billy G was still hovering around pouring cold water on some really stupid ideas. He finally relented on getting rid of the start menu and that turned out to be a total disaster.

Debian Stable user here. I had Windows 7, and it was a toss-up between using it and sticking with Win 7. There was always this feeling that using Linux was just a bunch of faffing around. I can't quite remember why I finally decided to go for it. I think I said I'd try it as an experiment for 6 months to see how I would get on. I should point out that I'm no Unix/Linux newbie and had installed Slackware on a machine back in the early 90's.

I've been through a whole bunch of distros. I'd generally recommend Ubuntu, but I grew increasingly frustrated with it.

Debian Stable works for me. It has a vast repo, all nicely integrated into a coherent whole. Unix(ish) is unsurpassed as a development platform.

The reason I say this is, as long as Zoom and maybe Skype work on my computer, which is over a decade old, it has enough for what I want. VS Code is also OK, unlike the abomination that is Eclipse. I can never stick to VS Code, but think it's a sensible choice if it works for you.

Windows 10 sounds like a nightmare from what I've heard. The constant updating, all at inconvenient times. I heard that Win 10 is allowed access to your data. Quite why folks didn't kick up a much bigger stink about this I don't know. Corporations are OK with MS sniffing through their documents? For real?

Win 10 seemed like a social experiment to see how hard they could kick consumers in the nuts and still get away with it. Win 11 seems to turn the insanity up to 11.

If anyone thinks Windows is any good, then all I can see is that they're suffering from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome. Non-commercial Linux distros are a breathe of fresh air.

I usually stay on Microsoft's happy path, running the latest versions of the OS on fully supported hardware. And I rarely change default settings, I'm not bothered by an icon for one of their games in the start menu.

But those little icons for holidays, etc, that showed up in the search bar really bugged me. It bothered me so much that I searched for a way to get rid of them. If Microsoft manages to annoy a fanboy like me, they've really missed the mark.

Another ad we got unsolicited from Microsoftadvertising.com to our support email.

Microsoft Advertising 719 MILLION DESKTOP SEARCHERS

Get ready to meet them.

When you know your audience, you can learn how to reach them. Let's take a closer look at the Microsoft Search Network audience. Start reaching them today >

They’re getting established

60% are ages 25-44

53% are married

53% graduated college or above They’re making big decisions

2.6M are planning last-minute travel

3.1M are researching a car purchase

2.2M are looking at a home loan

They’re spenders

32% spend more online than the average internet searcher

48% are in the top 25% of household incomes

This convinces me that leaving for Fedora 100% at home was the right move. It surprised me how it’s so far a _better_ desktop OS than Windows for me. Really. There are stuff all over the place working more smoothly, even things like hardware video decoding and interacting with windows. It’s so solid too. I have an Xbox for games and miss nothing.

For these and many other ongoing support reasons, I’ve been giving various Macs to my extended family since about Vista. For my grandfather, my mother in law, her daughter, and the various nephews, I can generally trust that a slightly locked down Mac with auto-update enabled will pretty much work as advertised.

What I find more encouraging trend wise is that I’m now seeing more alternative devices in the offices I work in. Even 5 years ago the standard device in the various banks and insurance shops I consult with has been a dell latitude or an hp elitebook, whereas now solid bet most of the devs have a macbook, and even a few linux boxes for the more adventurous orgs.

I’m not saying the macs are in any way perfect, and I’m sure they’ll eventually try many of the same things, but for the moment they have a user experience in a different league and i can’t see myself moving on from them for quite a while.

It's 2022. Who runs Windows? Consumers moved to iOS and devs moved to Linux/macOS.

The only thing I have that needs Windows is a service DVD for a motorcycle and autocad fusion. Both work great in VMs for my occasional use. The VMs contain all the user toxicity from spreading to the rest of my environment.

There's still gaming. I've got a bunch of games on GoG that don't have a Linux install and are 32-bit only for Mac.

"Not-so-great"? How about "absolutely fucking horrible"? What's with this "softening" of language these days? Is "doubleplusungood" next? I've been noticing it more and more lately on technical articles and it really pisses me off because it's trying to downplay the insanity of the situation and if anything only encourages MS to continue down this terrible path ("they just think it's not-so-great, no worries...")

To get them to listen and change course, beyond mass migrations away from Windows, I don't think muted complaints will work; we need to complain more, louder, harder. With the same amount of energy they're shoving this shit down our throats. To paraphrase Linus Torvalds: Microsoft, fuck you!

I stopped when they forced the microsoft account onto everyone, fun fact I changed the only email I use to auth with my msft account a few years ago... I can only login with the new it sends 2FA to my old one

the old one isn't listened in my account as additional emails or anything

I use CAD software for work. Starting in my current role I was given a laptop with Windows 11 preinstalled. I discovered my CAD software wasn't compatible with Win11 and had to downgrade to Win 10. Without fail, once a month, when I restart my computer, Windows prompts me to "upgrade" from Win 10->11 for free. There is no way to shut this feature off that I know of and frankly I just click NO three times and move on. Windows hasn't been this bad since Vista. I miss Win7.

Most people will go along with this. Most people don't care. Those that do have already left Microsoft for Apple a long time ago. HN is not representative of the general population, and these comments really show how out of touch people are on this site.

I feel like many users do care but are not comfortable enough with technology to realize they can turn some of this stuff off, or they aren’t comfortable with switching operating systems - much less installing Linux.

I can’t tell you how many people I encounter who don’t realize AdBlockers are something they can install. Once I get uBlockOrigin set up for them they tell me it is a night and day difference. Such technologies have been available for years but they either never realized it was an option, or thought it required some hackerman level of configuration to make it work.

My personal most hated features of W11.

Removing most right click options with clicking show more or some obscure icon.

Constant notifications making the bottom right of the screen unusable.

So many ways to pin a window moving it to just drop it feels like threading a needle.

I give Bing a try a couple of days ago. Shocked by how *extremely* cluttered it is(give it a try) Like every 'Don't' list of UX101 comes to live.

It's disgusting and at the same time, disappointing, consider their attempt to make user experience more cleaner in their other product.

We use windows at work because people need MS Office, CAD, and because it is the easiest platform for me to develop desktop apps for our scientific equipment.

Win 10 issues in this vein were a bit annoying but no too terrible

I've been dreading having to move to 11 someday. All the bad parts of 10 get cranked up. We can't even create local accounts (as is appropriate for a single-user / shared machine.)

I have been liking other Microsoft software the last few years. But why are they ruining Windows for any professional use?

Ugh... Why? Who is the human that this will benefit. What are MS execs smoking? Obviously it is the good stuff.

They lost the mobile phone because of their stupidity. Now trying to lose desktop too?

Reading these comments is kind of funny to me. Why does this surprise anyone? Microsoft has been doing things like this for decades. Remember in the 90s, when they blocked out non-IE web browsers and had a major lawsuit against them for it? And remember they introduced product activation, aka asking permission to run software you legally purchased.

This is just another entry on a long list of reasons I personally do not use Microsoft unless I have to.

Firefox (mobile) was pushing ads at me on [what is supposed to be] my home screen last week (Addidas and Nike being put in the first two slots).

Why would Microsoft not advertise in their browser when supposed competition is doing the same. Like, switch to Google and get their tracking, switch to Firefox and get their ads, ... "might as well stay with Edge" becomes a more realistic proposition every day.

[I'd personally probably move to links before using Edge, but that's just me.]

KDE also does #1, showing web search results when typing in the launcher. Probably just trying to be helpful rather than trying to push bing or edge or data mine my searches. But still it doesn't belong there IMO.

However I'm sure I'll find a setting to turn it off if it annoys me too much. That's what I love about KDE. I don't normally use the launcher much anyway so I haven't really bothered looking for the setting.

The browser protection extension was recently retired, adding a message that users should switch to edge. [1]

The pop-up is occurring every time I launch the development environment at work. https://www.reddit.com/r/DefenderATP/comments/z7xmtq/eol_for...

How can a company like Microsoft actively try to push away users from their products and gain from it?

I am minutes away from switiching over to Fedora at this point.

Due to a range of software compatibility, and the new scheduler, I'm going to have to upgrade to windows 11 soon.

For those who upgraded: is there an edition (like win10 LTSC), which disables all these nonsense, and creates a livable computing environment?

If not, is there something like w10privacy for windows 11?

if neither, what's the current-best guide of setting up, and locking in a livable environment?

I used to run a windows box occasionally for gaming, but have completely replaced it with PopOS. Proton is truly amazing tech IMO. My whole steam library runs as well as it did on windows.

Posting this here for others that might not have known. I could have switched away from windows for gaming long ago but Steam oddly doesn't promote / enable Proton by default.

It's really miracle tech, I'm not sure if people really understand how good it is. I've got a library of ~300 Steam games, and less than 10 of them don't launch with Proton. I think I've had more problems on Windows...

Windows update frequently break my laptop. For instance, one time the speakers just stopped working. That eventually got fixed. And recently (and still broken) .local mDNS lookups I use to ssh into my Linux desktop to code no longer work.

I dread what my laptop will be like when I hear it whir awake when closed.

The company software auto updated my machine to Win 11. There were many issues but two of them really struck out

1. The right click context menu change

2. The highlight around windows on Alt + Tab got very hard to see

I just gave up in a week and got a new machine with Win 10 from IT. Had to install everything from scratch.

It seems they improved #2 in 22H2, but at the same time removed the registry option for the classic Alt+Tab dialog.

I use windows server at work and even the newest ones are pretty agreeable. There might be a real case to be made to just user a server license for desktop. I wonder what the drawbacks of that are these days for say gaming or trying to use it on a laptop?

I am a happy Windows "user". Specifically, I use it for its superior battery/power management on laptops, and mainly as a VNC client to connect to Linux desktops. As long as I'm in control of the firewall, it's also free from ads.

Any tips on setting up the firewall to block the MS-generated adds?

Personally I just block everything and create whitelist rules for what I need to connect to.

>More attempts to impose Edge

I don't particularly mind this. Apple already forces Safari down our throats at every turn. And Edge is honestly a pretty great browser. Unless you're a Mozilla purist, there's really no better choice on Windows at this point.

You should be pissed off that your OS doesn't give you the freedom to choose which browser you use as a default. While you may think Edge is good, I use a different browser and my OS shouldn't be allowed to override the preference.

> Edge is honestly a pretty great browser

Edge is the only browser I’ve ever used that tries to sell me some sort of credit card deal or reward points or some shit. Got a popup just yesterday when testing a browser extension of mine on Edge.

>Unless you're a Mozilla purist, there's really no better choice on Windows at this point.

Oh, yes,here is. It's the browers I chose to prefer to install, and its the only one i chose* to use on a daily basis.

If you've noticed that when you search in Windows 11, there's a big delay in the results coming up (or worse, they come up for a split second, then disappear for a while before coming back again), it's the web search that's the problem.

You can turn it off to get fast search back:

Regedit: Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows

Sub-key (folder) "Explorer" - create if it's not there.

New > DWORD (32-bit) -> DisableSearchBoxSuggestions

Set value to true

If you're gonna pirate (well, use leaked activation keys) then install the enterprise version which has less of this crap to deal with.

I hate start menu ads and edge default pages because they have animation which beings rdp to a crawl.

Maybe this is why my Windows just leaves me to it maybe.

I still haven’t recovered from when Microsoft changed Classic to Tiles. It was a shock to years of muscle memory. There were plenty of hacks to get the Classic UI emulated. Start > Programs you are dear to heart.

Windows was fine 10 years ago when I switched to Mac, but it seems like every time I look back, the OS is more hostile. They basically took every reason to use an ad blocker, and baked those into the OS.

I just run W10Privacy program every now and then, and it disables all the ads, telemetry and bloatware in Windows. Takes 5 minutes. No such program exists for Android or iOS, it just can't exist.

My pro 1 running lineageOS begs to disagree. Android can be customized to your liking if you know what you're doing. You may argue that that is removed from the default experience enough that it's not that valid of a use case, but w10privacy hardly is a common use case.

W10Privacy takes 5 minutes to run. Frankly, how long did it take you to go through all the lineOS hoops? And how many apps still don't work on your phone?

All of the apps I've ever installed have worked. The longest i've spent tinkering was to get gpay working after root, and I was trailblazing. The procedure I wrote then is still effective.

The only non-working app i've ever encountered was called "cats and soup" (an idle game) and I just had to hide lucky patcher.

In total I'd say I spent about 4 hours total on it. Sure it's more than the 5 minutes for w10Privacy but I get significantly more out of it, such as yt vanced, lucky patcher inapp payment emulation, OASP mods, and xposed and magisk modules, not to mention system-wide adblock.

I have the same sorts of gripes with VS Code; stubbornness from the people running the project at MS and refusal to listen to the userbase. It seems to be a pervasive trait at MS.

It’s quite ironic reading about the complain of the “recommend webpage section in the start menu” while getting 20% of my screen (iPad) stolen by a “destiny 2” ad…

I don't understand how microsoft can be bring so much in the Open Source world and this kind of things in the OS world. Seems completely out of touch.

MS open source is a recent marketing PR effort, not a business model.

Microsoft is not a singular coherent entity, it’s a pile of separate teams.

I say it every time I see similar posts, but these kind of features and being tied to an Ms account has made me leave windows for Linux and MacOS.

You can still use Windows 11 with just a local account, see for example https://www.windowscentral.com/how-set-windows-11-without-mi....

Yes you can however every so often I see the let’s finish setup screen will appear to prompt you, again you can continue without an account and then be nagged again.

Go to the Notifications page in Settings and untick “Offer Suggestions on How I Can Set Up My Device”.

Thank you that's useful, ill sure be setting it. I just wish it was not necessary, certainly in Pro version.

For context I used and loved Windows since I was a teenager with Windows 3.1 but for me I just find an OS with such features to jarring for daily use. Also note Mac OS has its problems too. I was so excited for W11 and generally love most of it.

Oh and I run Linux on a Surface Laptop.

What a pile of shit Windows has become. The user hostility was present from day 1, but they really visibly ramp it up over the years.

Reminds me of how Chrome is forcing manifest v3 on its users. I’m busy switching our company over to Brave as a result.

https://archive.vn/XoqA4

Switch to linux. Gaming on it isn't that big of a problem now.

Speaking of all this, on my windows 11 machine I get McAfee popups, and for the life of me, I can't track down where they come from or how to turn them off. My son has a windows 10 machine and has the same problem. Why does Microsoft put up with this? I only use windows when I have to because of crap like this.

Windows is aggressively regressing since Windows 7. Bizarre move

So, impositions, ads and lacking ability to disable…

Was not Win 10 the last operating system version?

Apple stopped using 10.x versions for Mac OS, so Microsoft had to respond.

(I guess the real reason is stuff like the TPM requirements and no 32 bit version meaning it drops support for some systems Windows 10 runs on?)

That was never an official MS statement: https://www.pcworld.com/article/394724/why-is-there-a-window...

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