Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Microsoft simply must believe that Windows can survive the users hating this crap, and I fear they are right. For myself 11 was bad enough to finally try out Steam on Debian and was pleasantly surprised. KDE is closer to being the Windows desktop I want than Windows 11 is, which is just insane.
Minor point for the article, OOBE is a very widespread term in the consumer technology industry, not MS specific.
Start menu is slow as shit
I have w11 at work and w10 at home and i see the diff
So I can't imagine I'm seeing the same thing as what's got so many people up in arms about the start menu. Did I get a weird OEM configuration? It's a newish Lenovo Legion laptop. I haven't changed any start menu settings.
To answer that question, check out the screenshot in the article. If you have a similar spittoon-load of crapware installed, you have the same experience as ~everyone else and for some reason you aren't registering it.
If you don't, something ethical happened.
They're trivial to remove and don't affect performance. When I think crapware, I think bloaty nonsense that no one needs or wants like Bonzi Buddy or 900 different browser toolbars. I don't see unpinning a few things on a fresh install as some great burden.
Spyware is still every bit as invasive and harmful as it was in the Bonzi Buddy days, but it looks a bit different and now ships as part of OS itself. You should try to unblind yourself to it because no matter how much you think you aren't affected by it you are absolutely being taken advantage of.
Those shortcuts weren't put there for you as a courtesy. Those are paid advertisements
I mean, logistically I'd expect parent to agree with that. They don't take up any additional space that you, the end-user, could take advantage of (because they were on the system partition).
Personally, I agree that stating which programs are to be installed on your hardware is a good way to determine who actually owns the hardware, but if parent is logically consistent, then sure: it'd be "just a shortcut" that the average end-user will take advantage of.
We live in a times that are good for developers: we not only have free access to powerful tools that other professionals need to pay big bucks but it goes even further: with open source we can co-shape these tools and in the extreme cases fork and create our own derivatives.
Why not take advantage of this and just avoid proprietary solutions as much as possible?
> The next thing for me is to "decloud" - meaning remove any and all online services that are not mission critical.
For me there are multiple parallel "side quests" and decloud is definitely one of them (I strive to minimize cloud and select solutions that can be self hosted and that are E2EE. Then I pay for hosting anyway but I always have an option of rolling my own. Example: etesync for calendars and contacts).
Other side quests: instead of Gnome use Sway, this requires manually picking wifi/Bluetooth connection managers (iwctl and bluetoothctl work well) and other tooling.
Yet another: convert my entire family to use Linux. Sadly this is harder since schools teach Windows but Gnome looks very similar to what they use.
These are just some examples. The good thing is that all of these are small steps that can be taken in any order to improve the situation in small increments.
These are often useful, so the better option is to host your own privacy-respecting versions of these tools.
I usually end up using something like htop for a quick overview, together with nvidia-smi when I do GPU-related stuff.
> any random hang-up is a forced restart, no way to kill offending process as EVERYTHING just freezes up.
I've not had this happen for as long as I've used Linux, besides GPU driver bugs/crashes that brought down the computer, but I've had this happen more frequently on Windows than Linux. Processes using up all CPU should make the computer a lot slower to use, but shouldn't bring it down. Processes using up all RAM should be killed by the OOM manager that you distribution should include (but anyways you should have swap setup to avoid the situation in the first place). Processes using up all disk space is a bit harder, but again shouldn't bring the computer down.
> a lot of things magically stop working or break, forcing me to spend hours on google to fix some crap by copypasting random nonsense into terminal.
I'm guessing the problem of having things stop working/breaking "magically" is a effect of random copypasting stuff into the terminal, not the other way around.
Linux does want you to learn about the system in order for you to not mangle it, which has it's good and bad sides. Think of it like a chef having sharp knives in order to do their job better, it's true that you could do more damage if you fuck up, but their job requires them to have professional knowledge about the tools they use, and the knowledge about how to use those tools in a good way.
That's the Windows way. It's a bad fit for Linux, because there is no one true obsessively-backwards-compatible Linux.
The good news is we don't need it: Linux isn't a black box, so we don't need to guess or study its behavior. We can look it up instead. The goal here is to construct understanding from documentation, as opposed to deconstructing behavior from testing.
Some great starting points to get your bearings are:
- https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page
- man pages
Having everything lock up I don’t think I’ve ever seen, only way I could see that happen is a runaway process eats all the memory of the machine, and somehow dodges the OOM killer. Especially if the machine is configured with no swap (don’t do that).
And I’m saying that as someone who doesn’t really like linux.
> forcing me to spend hours on google to fix some crap by copypasting random nonsense into terminal
Have you considered that “copy pasting random nonsense into terminal” could be the source of your issues?
On some systems you need to enable this feature first, so try it out once to see if it works and look up how to enable it, if it doesn't.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
On most distros, you can also get into a command line, with the combination CTRL + ALT + F1 - F8 (try out which function keys do it for you and how to get back to the GUI). There you can use `ps`, `kill <pid>`, `reboot now` or restart the GUI. I'd keep a note of the exact commands on my phone just in case.
As a sidenote, I've had an issue on a good windows desktop PC where it freezes when watching YouTube or ither streaming services. I can still move the mouse for a bit, but clicking does nothing and I'm unable to even save it from a hard reset with Ctrl + Alt + Delete. Sometimes it won't happen for weeks, but if I'm unlucky multiple times in an hour. Look up "PC freezes while watching YouTube" and you will see I'm far from alone with this issue, Asus motherboards with new AMD processors seem to be the common factor. Haven't had this happen on Linux yet (dual boot) and I've tried everything to avoid these unusual freezes in windows, but nothing seems to help.
I am hoping someone comes up with a fully dis-arcaned distro. Especially ditch (or remap) goofy command line relics into the obvious and easily remembered. Why do we still use CP instead of Copy? Legacy stuff that greybeards would freak if it were changed. Let them use a greybeard distro and make one that is for joe user.
Yes, I use Mint and it is still full of arcane crap.
Also good to note: there's tons of problems uniquely with windows that I'm sure are just "computer problems" and "computer slowness" to you, and you never blame windows.
"Basic" in Windows is all stuff you can easily do with a mouse. Getting anywhere with Linux requires comfort with the command line, OK, but even after spending a decent amount of time, there are lots of system-specific and application-specific commands that you need to master to actually get the system humming. And a total rabbit hole when errors start to pop up. Getting a handle on all of this, being able to understand and fix errors, this is well beyond "basic" and the condescending attitude "just need to learn a few more basic skills" is a huge turn-off. Saying nothing is more helpful than telling someone they just need to learn "basic skills."
Linux requires being super comfortable on the keyboard, using cli nearly exclusively and recalling with perfect accuracy arcane letter incantations which if you know the guy who wrote the program and the full name of his dog makes sense but to everyone else is just random letters strung together.
It works on Windows also and in my opinion is better than the default on there too.
If something hangs I just kill or pkill it via the terminal.
I see people offering nice advice here but I mostly do ps aux | grep thing and then kill (-9) it... or killall :)
> any random hang-up is a forced restart, no way to kill offending process as EVERYTHING just freezes up.
I had the everything freeze up experience initially on a Dell laptop and frankly don't know what was the cause. Maybe missing microcode updates or old firmware? Nowadays it almost never happens (I don't remember it happening over the months). I have an app crash (like Firefox) ~once a month but it's so rare I barely notice.
Note: I also do this on macOS but it’s much less useful since there are very few commands to actually restore a session that’s locked up.
Unless you are dealing with a kernel panic, this will work.
I think this is becoming yet another "boiling the frog" strategy: You don't even have to make this stuff completely impossible - you only have to add enough friction and general unpleasantness that the (mental) costs of using a local account exceed the benefits.
Then companies have their cake and eat it too: To everyone saying they are now forced to use an account they can reply "oh no, it's technically still possible to use the software without an account, so no coercion happens" while everyone who actually tries to do so will either give up or look like a lunatic.
Windows is full of garbage. MacOS jumped the shark on UI and is irritating in so many ways as it tries to be some Frankenstein’s monster of a desktop and mobile-inspired UI. And Linux is incapable of watching videos in a browser without destroying my CPU (Nvidia lacks hardware video decoding on Linux) and continues with all the classic “engineers don’t do UX” problems.
Not one option feels “good” to me. There’s just levels of tolerable.
That's… not true. Fact, they don't support VA-API, but there is support for some other methods like NVDEC.
Programs like mpv can use it directly while for something like Firefox you can use a wrapper like nvidia-vaapi-driver[1].
It's not ideal, but that's what you get from buying their stuff.
It's 2023. For me that means my OS cannot hardware decode video. It's just not a real option for maybe 99% of PC users.
> I should be working out the dependency story and compiling some driver from Github myself.
no, nvidia _should_ make it easier for people using the 3rd most popular desktop OS to use their hardware. It would make them more competitive against AMD and Intel, which both support hardware video decoding.
That's probably not going to happen, so the next best option is to install a package from the package manager [0]. There might be some kind of compilation needed, but in my experience that's rarely an issue (aside from time), especially if it's coming out of the package manager for a popular distribution.
> It's just not a real option for maybe 99% of PC users.
well, 99% of PC users with Nvidia hardware. It's an important distinction since this problem is specific to Nvidia. If the solution is to installing a package from the package manager, it's only as difficult as installing the browser in the first place.
I do agree there's some extra questions that may make things difficult, or unfamiliar for the vast majority of people, though. Like how is someone supposed to know they need the nvidia-vaapi-driver package anyway?
[0] - https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver#package-manag...
I think there is still hope for Windows as well. It's basically like the Star Trek movies: every bad release seems to be followed by a slightly better one.
The only thing I can't quite make peace with is using #ffffff for window decorations. Whatever you're smoking Apple, it's time to quit it.
Some of this can be remedied with accessibility settings. Most things will likely stay broken until someone at Apple calls for yet another pointless redesign that will break something else in return.
That’s a hot take. Big Sur’s redesign is perfectly fine.
The only redesign I hate is Settings (especially since it disallows full screen, WHY?), but the rest is fine, and arguably less « in your face »
isn't that just life in general? You compromise with family, with where you work, with how much you pay for stuff at the store, even with your own mind. Nothing is ever ideal.
Oh I remember now, it was missing a whole bunch of dependencies on Jammy, so it was taking me down a dark path of figuring out the compilation story for a bunch of stuff.
I'm not interested in babysitting my OS. I have real work I want to do with my limited time. It's a very frustrating UX... insofar as there basically is no UX.
Imagine if your local supermarket regularly reshuffled all the wares because this would force the customers to rediscover the location of everything again. This is the kind of thing that is being pushed? How do we stop this? To me this seems like a complete and utter resignation of human decision-making and empathy to machine driven metrics. "Computers says that my doohickey metric went up by 30% this month, I'll get a nice bonus".
The end caps might change periodically, but the location of 99% of items is the same every time I have gone.
Costco would probably be guilty of moving things around the most, but I assume this is partly due to their logistics and partly due to them wanting people to browse.
He says that this is actually a threshold poll, and if too many people respond "yes" that triggers the Grand Reshuffling of Merchandise overnight!
I actually think he's exactly right. Why does a cashier care whether you found everything? You're already checking out, it's too late to go hunting for more, and the cashier can't be the one who could help you look. So it's not an invitation to customer service, it's simply gauging your satisfaction.
I will say costco will often move a product I regularly buy to an endcap to put it on sale. Then I can't find it anymore and am unable to buy it that week. I've tried asking the employees where it went but they never know either. Now I do a brief scan and then give up. For all I know they stopped carrying the product entirely.
UK supermarkets go so far as to randomly drop free promo items “by accident” into baskets for online delivery in the knowledge that people will get hooked on the new thing, so you can’t escape it just by going online.
https://www.tenforums.com/browsers-email/167957-truly-blank-...
Edit: I have a regedit file with the value "about:blank" and it just takes a double click.
That's awesome. Just emailed the link to myself to add it to my decrapify scripts.
For Microsoft Edge, both on my personal computers and work computer about:blank is my home page and new tab page. (Home: Edge version 115.0.1901.203; Windows Pro 22H2)
Under the "When Edge starts" setting, I select "Open these pages:" and add "about:blank"
I don't use windows very often, so I usually shut it down instead of hibernate so I can access its drive if needed from Linux. So it's a pain to reload all the pages from the last time, because I'll probably need them, that's why they were active.
In my case, I've found a "blank tab" or similar extensions which works well enough.
Oh Glob yes. De-venoming Edge is part of my RDP setup routine.
One of my colleagues maintains a Windows box at home, and tells me he hates opening the thing because whenever he does the OS gives him "chores" to do - you _must_ update this bit, you need to listen to this offer, etc. Like, you're the computer and I'm the human! I give you the work, not the other way around.
Anyways, the sum of my rant is I finally switched to PopOS. It's been surprisingly smooth, especially with Proton making Linux gaming so easy. If anybody is thinking of doing it, now's the time to try it out.
Mobile devices wake instantly. Official app stores are much safer from malware than the Windows software acquisition ecosystem of running an Internet search, the first search result being malware, he website having fake download buttons, and downloading often unsigned .exe files. There’s no anti-virus software bogging down I/O. There’s less maintenance like disk defragmentation, Windows Updates that take an hour and require a forced restart. Users can’t get lost opening a file they downloaded because files are hidden away through the abstraction of apps. If you’re just consuming content you might not even own a PC.
Sometimes I still need to use some legacy program or whatever on there but I feel like the last time I booted into that thing was over a month ago now.
I install Windows only for job interviews. Usually I install it 2 days ahead, and keep running windows update repeatedly, until it finally finishes with everything, and I can use the system for a 30 minutes call, before I would install a usable OS.
Maybe a bit tangential: until about 10 years ago I used only Windows. One day I tried make something bluetooth related work on it, I don't even remember what. I just remember that it kept failing in a very cryptic way. It got me so angry after many hours that I just deleted the whole OS, and swore that I will learn Linux starting immediately, and that will be my main system going forward. It became my career after a few months, lol. Don't know if I should be grateful for Windows or not.
I'll be honest: I find it that it's very much a hit nowadays, rather than a miss.
With Valve doing so much work around Proton I can basically buy a random Windows-only game off Steam and... it just works. I don't even remember anymore a time when a game I wanted to play didn't just work.
(Of course this doesn't include multiplayer games with anti-cheat. If you like those then yes, you still need Windows.)
I used to dual-boot for a few games, but nowadays I just don't bother anymore. I check protondb beforehand and most of the games I played just ran without issues. I think the last time I booted Windows for games was for Space Engineers a couple of years ago (which seems to work now, but looks like a pain to set up).
> and some video conference software (e.g. webex with camera
Meh, IME webex works fine enough in a browser (Firefox/X11). I haven't had any more issues under than Linux than my colleagues running Windows. Even Teams is just as crappy under Linux.
> [bluetooth]
I like when people complain about Linux and the proverbial crappy sound issues. The best Bluetooth headphone experience I've ever had was hands down Linux (though I've never had AirPods). It's the only one which connects reliably to my phones right away (macos was usually good enough at this) and it's also the only one that can use the better codec (ldac).
Lmao nah that shit doesn't work
If that fails there are chip specific tools you can use to read/write to the right partitions, such as the fantastic EDL tool for Qualcomm devices:
The taskbar “Search” box had a new “fun” little icon representing whatever search item they wanted to advertise to me today. Had to find windows “tips” site to work out how to turn it off…
Not as egregious as “full screen game adverts on login screen by default” though.
It boggles my mind how people don't find it absolutely infuriating. I watch quite a lot of streams and people always have 3 things enabled that I personally would disable instantly:
- huge searchbox taking a good 1/3 of the taskbar (I've yet to see anyone use this control for initiating a search)
- the playful icon in this huge searchbox (you mentioned it)
- Weather widget in the taskbar (just why?)
I assume that vast majority of Windows users just don't care.
Most of them it's not so much that they don't care as it is that they've been literally brainwashed their entire lives to believe that Windows holds the top market position because it's somehow "superior" to other operating systems. They really truly believe the decades old Ballmer FUD about other operating systems. It's impossible in their minds that Microsoft gained such a stranglehold over the PC operating system market through completely unethical, borderline illegal means, and no amount of well-documented historical fact can change their minds about it. It's very nearly a literal cult.
now with all that said, on topic: I haven't seen this search fun icon nor really any ads on W11. Don't know if that's because I opted out of any personalized targeting or whatnot, but I wasn't nagged much once I got everything installed and customized my toolar.
For that reason, I made sure I rotated through all my VMs about once a month, just spin up and down for no other reason but updating.
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I dont really ever go into Quick Actions or use notifications in windows
Genuinely had not noticed there are ads in there. But there are, you are right. Well, I see a single 'suggested app' advert for a game.
Also I disabled web results in Windows Search a while back, maybe that helped
Control = control
Alt = meta
Windows flag key = super
On top of that you also have to run tools like O&O ShutUp10++ to shut off all telemetry settings.
It's like Windows is working against me... I just wanted an OS for my parents laptop and instead I have all this bloatware.
Sure, Google's an ad company, and the telemetry is taken for granted, but they don't put animated, undeletable shit in the app menu, there's never a popup to remind me I haven't purchased something, or even that some obscure, irrelevant system process died or needs attention. There's no shovelware; how could there be?
Surely they have many years to enshittify this as well, but in 2023, the ChromeOS experience is clean and mature, it's less expensive, and it's easy on your resources.
Yet.
Anyone who thinks otherwise, do go through a full install and then observe how many apps are installed that you cannot uninstall.
And it's true that you can't really uninstall things from Windows either... Xbox 360 Bar... it will be there forever. If you ever touch Windows Hello PIN logon, that will never be disabled again.
The only way to have an OS install be minimal is to choose a Linux, a distro will likely give you lots of things you may not want still (i.e. games, the office suite) but at least you can uninstall those all quickly.
At least all this junk doesn't start up random daemons, like windows does.
Thank goodness for Linux being the solution for 99% of time.
It's gross but it's sort of the norm now. Why shouldn't Microsoft do it if that's ok when apple does it?
'Apple doesn't mandate Apple ID sign-in. Apple does put "helpful" "reminders" about setting up Apple Pay, iCloud backups, and a few other things into its setup screens, but it doesn't take your full screen over again to try to get you to opt in to things you've already said no to. There is a notification in the Settings app asking you to sign in and set a few things up if you haven't, but they're dismissable, and they stay dismissed. Safari doesn't pester you to switch back to it once you've switched away, like a 4-year-old who asks you what time it is every time the clock changes (I don't know if this is a widely relatable example, but it's my lived reality at present). There are no third-party applications installed beyond the under-the-hood open source bits and pieces that are baked into macOS's foundations.'
And:
'My frustration is not so much with what Microsoft is doing but how it is doing it. So many of Microsoft's reminders and notifications feel like they happen at the expense of respecting the user's choices.'
Personally I find the dislike of both to be reasonable and I don't think Microsoft's is much worse than apple.
As a developer, I use Windows... a lot. I can't imagine writing complicated C++ without Visual Studio; the debugger is just that good. I regularly script and administer my installs with PowerShell. I like writing fast GUI code that will run on Windows XP with not much fuss.
Now, I like nuance, so I will distinguish between Windows, the OS—which is actually really nice—and Windows the bean-county bit, which sucks.
Millenium Edition sucked
XP was great
Vista sucked
Windows 7 was great
Windows 8 sucked
Windows 10 was (is) great
Windows 11 sucks
At this point it’s a tradition. Stick to Windows 10 until Windows 12 comes I guess
Windows 10 LTSC is the same. (Windows 11 LTSC will come later next year)
I use these for years and don't have any problems.
How much does that cost compared to Pro or Home? I cannot even find the pricing for it.
MS doesn't care either, they rather have you pirating it than switch to Mac
This doesn't excuse Microsoft for screwing up so many aspects of Windows but a $5 option to fix most of the things that bother me is a no-brainer.
A wizard for modification.
>A Microsoft 365 trial offer.
>A 100GB OneDrive offer.
>A $1 introductory PC Game Pass offer.
Whats so bad about those?
I think what's happening here is two things: First, a personal computing device is fundamentally an extension of your own self into the digital world, functioning similar to how you use your limbs to interact with the physical world. Having a personal computing device overtly act in someone else's interest and not yours is not that dissimilar to having someone else manipulate your arms and legs to force you to go to certain places or interact with things that you don't want to.
Second, most ads have the redeeming quality of being ignorable. If there's an ad on a billboard, I can look somewhere else instead or just close my eyes. If there's an ad on a news website, I can (hopefully!) scroll past it. If there's an ad in my dreams (or indeed, on my home screen), it's forcing itself on me and violating that premise of ignorability.
Id never call dumb ass computer as a "my extension" despite the fact that it pays me well and I use it a lot.
Maybe if youre social media addict then yea.
well maybe that's the issue. I see it more like operating a car than me acting as some avatar renovating my house. Ideally there'd be a smooth flat empty road, but there will be bumps, annoying people, billboards, and sketch sand roads. It's all a part of the journey, and in many cases I'm riding through a pre-defined world.
At least I can remove more of these in the ditital world.
I disagree. Ecosystems enable better ux, look at Apple.
Also nobody prevents you from moving your files from OneDrive to e.g Google
Or using Google docs instead of MS Word
I would also not be surprised if they are banking on people accidentally clicking Yes to make the annoyance go away.
Is there law for that?
There was such a thing for browsers, but I dont know about services