windows feels more and more like adware these days, kind of hard to beat the performance you get w/ a mac, not to mention a consistent ux
It's absurd how badly the Windows customer experience has degraded in the name of bundling shitty Bejeweled clones - how much money could MSFT be possibly making on this kind of deal that makes the trade worthwhile?!
Not to mention some of the less egregious but nonetheless annoying things - when I had my Win10 install the default Docs directory pointed at the cloud-synced container which then proceeded to pester me about upgrading to a paid plan. Not just once or twice and not in an unobtrusive way - literally on every single boot in the task bar.
Unless you need GPU performance. In that case it's very easy to beat the performance of most Macs unless you spend 60% more.
Windows is a piece of shit. It's honestly one of the worst pieces of software I have to use on a daily basis. I've always been some kind of a linux enthusiast, but I've always had to use windows as my daily driver due to either CAD software, ableton live, a certain game not playing nice with linux, etc.
I've been using windows for 2 decades now, and I just can't believe it keeps getting worse and worse. It's slow, it's riddled with ads, it's constantly changing everything around for no good reason. I'm so sick of it, and I'm STILL stuck with it. If I could move autodesk inventor and ableton live over, I'd finally be free, but I've had no luck. I'm just really appalled by the garbage microsoft has pushed out
This lets me completely isolate windows and only use it for games. And ableton runs just fine in a vm, so I don’t have to have a separate Mac. Plus it makes it really easy to try out the new Linux flavor of the month!
It was a bit of work to get it figured out but it’s been running smoothly like this for a few years now. I refuse to install windows as a first-class citizen on any computer I own, because as you said, it’s fucking garbage.
Which edition of Windows 11 is less/least/not ad-y? Is Pro in any ways better than Home?
Is there an Enterprise edition that I, as a 'normal person' / non-corporate entity, can purchase and use on my personal system (or VM running under Linux/macOS)? I would think that corporations would not want ads on their employer-provided systems, and so they aren't present in the {Pro?, Enterprise?} releases.
Pro is better than home as it supports domain join so it will "allow" local accounts (hidden in the OOBE UI under "domain join instead"). As it can domain join it should respect every setting you could set through GPO and allow you to configure a bunch of things the home version won't. But if you're not a windows admin that knows this stuff already do you really want to invest your time in wrangling a increasingly hostile OS?
Enterprise is not really for sale to most people. Technically i suppose you could buy a M365 E3 subscription and use that to activate pro to enterprise, but again do you really want to?
Sometimes it's needed for certain applications, so one has to at least run it in a VM perhaps.
I do Linux sysadmin stuff, but we have to deal with Windows clients, and so I many need it a (home) lab to play with things. I can do domain-y stuff with Samba 4 at least.
Aside from yet another revamp of the settings menus it feels more or less like windows. The gripes about the start bar and start menu are valid but fixable.
Only thing is closing down some widgits the first time that I never saw again and uninstalling a few applications.
Launcher ads. Live desktop ads. News ads. Weather ads. Settings page ads. Game bar ads. Lock screen ads.
I turn them off as I run across them, but I can never seem to catch them all.
Make Windows shut up for good with Tinywall (https://tinywall.pados.hu/) and whitelist applications as needed.
If you have the ability to install explorerpatcher I'd recommend it.
I have a Windows 11 Pro machine and the only intrusive thing I've ever seen was the small weather box on the taskbar, which I immediately turned off. I've never seen any of the others you mention.
If its relevant I use Firedox and Kagi rather than Edge and Bing/Google.
I've never seen an ad for tv+, music or icloud on macOS.
I definitely remember seeing a tv+ signup with I first got my M2. After setting up the device.
If you're not signed into icloud, well you still have all the apps that want you to sign in. Same goes with the tv app.
I use the music app on iOS with mp3s and 3 of the 4 main app tabs are screens trying to sign me up for apple music.
Finally, I can easily put the dock (which W11 imitates, badly) on the left hand side of my screen if I wish. But I suppose Macs are less customisable?
I do see the windows stuff as more upselling to other microsoft apps like onedrive which to me doesn't seem so different form the icloud integration. I use both an haven't noticed much in win11 though.
It is not even comparable.
Just the other day, my M1 Mac at work slowed to such a crawl that mouse movement badly lagged due to runaway 'triald' (ML learning on user inputs) and Siri processes. They relaunched every time I killed them, and they were running even though Siri was explicitly disabled. Turns out there's no way to actually disable Siri without disabling SIP, which I cannot do on my work computer.
So on macOS I'm still plagued with cloud-connected crap I cannot control (or sometimes even expect) that at worst can make my computer completely unusable.
Is it different from Windows bullshit in interesting ways worth talking about? Definitely. Can the two things be compared? Definitely!
- nagging
- online accounts
- tracking user behavior
- 'free' cloud services (the user is the product, blah blah blah)
- having an adversarial relationship with your own tools; having to go to extraordinary lengths to disable user-hostile behavior
When you think seriously about what adware is like and what actually makes it so odious, it's clear that parts of macOS are characterized by many of the same traits and behaviors, even though Apple isn't selling third-party ads in macOS the way Microsoft is doing with Windows.
I can't remember ever seeing anything about TV+ or Music, and the only time I'm told about iCloud storage is when my drive or backups are almost out of space, which makes sense.
There might be invitations to TV/Music when you install it or first use the OS or something (I can't remember), but there absolutely isn't anything "all the time".
This only makes sense to iCloud users. I've never intentionally put anything in iCloud and I get a constant parade of alerts about it being full. On macOS it doesn't matter where you click on the alert widget, it takes you to the page where you can pay for iCloud regardless. It is very spammy.
Also, the Mac notification has a prominent "Close" button and doesn't even mention iCloud until you click through to see available options:
Whenever I hit the play button it's like 50/50 if Spotify will continue or if apple will open up the music app inviting me to sign up for music.
I did get pestered about joining icloud pretty regularly in the past but haven't seen those in a bit. I prefer onedrive and Google photos since it works on my non apple machines too.
That's not my experience with Windows, where I get random popups in the UI of the operating system about different offers. Not cool.
But after a month of running windows 11 with explorerpatcher for gaming, hobby programming, and music production (daw, vsts etc) everything is pretty flawless.
One of the main reasons I stick with Windows on my personal PC is I can enable RDP and use a Linux or Mac RDP client to access my beefy computer.
I'm pretty sure remote desktop apps aren't exclusive to Windows.
If you're interested in a turnkey alternative, consider NoMachine.
If you are willing to play around with finicky stuff, Xpra and FreeNX easily outperformed RDP the last time I played with all this stuff (many years ago).
For Linux to Linux X Forwarding-based solutions give you a much better, local-like experience with Linux than you can get without paying many thousands of dollars for Terminal Services on Windows.