Windows 11 – There's still nothing worth my time
dedoimedo.com
dedoimedo.com
Like, y'all could just do a 25th Anniversary Edition of Windows 2000 and people would go ape shit for it.
And I think everyone knew from context that the claim was strongly tongue in cheek.
Making confident but incorrect statements is not snarkyness. That's like me saying climate change isn't happening.
Windows 10 you can go through a couple of clicks of a Wizard and reboot, and Windows will install Hyper-V type 1 hypervisor, seamlessly virtualise the host OS and not even look or feel different. It will integrate with Windows patching, with PowerShell Hyper-V cmdlets, with subsystems like WSL2, with Volume Shadow Copy. It's localised into different languages, documented, and supported. It's got virtual switch and networking support layered into the Windows network subsystem. And you can go through a couple of clicks of a Wizard and reboot, and Windows will seamlessly un-virtualise the OS, and that's all just gone. On almost any random hardware it's not limited to Dell servers with qualified drivers, you can do it on a desktop or laptop with the right CPU instructions and Windows license level.
How much human programmer effort, planning, design and time does the parent poster think that took? And that happened alongside all the other changes to internals, process isolation, memory compression, UAC, networking stack, and along with merging tablet PC Windows and Xbox Windows and Windows Server into one unified codebase.
No all that goes into "I didn't use it, I didn't see it, I hate it, so it counts as doing nothing".
Repeat for all the features. "Oh they just added new hardware support" - Bluetooth support is more than a driver, it's a whole front end for discovery, sharing, there's APIs into the Metro apps and WinRT for apps to send files and data over Bluetooth, there's Bluetooth audio stack, Windows telephony subsystem integration for answering calls.
Multiple monitors? High DPI screens? Multiple desktops? Fractional display scaling?
You can run Windows 2000 in a browser here: https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...
It's pretty, it's classic, it's coherent, it's responsive. People would go ape-shit over this? Really?
(Is it a coincidence that Windows and Mac users look at it and think it's a nice retro legacy toy from 25 years ago, and Linux users look at it and think it's a futuristic utopia?)
I too have nostalgia for the days when my start menu didn't phone home to microsoft, and focused on making my computer useful rather than trying to sell me stuff. Would I give up things like hi-dpi support to get that back? Hell no.
A great feature. They dumbed it down though.
> Unlike in previous versions of Windows NT, the Win32 console windows can now be resized without any restrictions.
Truly a great achievement. It took MS 2 decades.
> It can be made to cover the full screen by pressing the Alt+↵ Enter combination on keyboard.
Maybe i'm too old, but this was always working.
And the cherry on the cake: > The modern Settings app from Windows 8 continues to evolve in Windows 10,
I mean, taking a man, cutting his limbs and stuffing his mouth, hardly can be called "evolution".
>Truly a great achievement. It took MS 2 decades.
It could be resized since Win2000 I think, but not by dragging the window edges, there's a Properties dialog box accessible from the top-left icon menu. You can set the window size there. There's also a Defaults dialog that sets the properties of all future console windows.
So? Linux is still mostly on ext4, and even though there's theoretically zfs/btrfs, most people are still using ext4. Debian installer still only supports ext4. ext4 might be "newer" than NTFS (2006 vs 1993), but that's a purely naming thing. If you map ext2 and ext3 as NTFS versions[1], they have similar age. Moreover from a feature set perspective they're mostly equivalent. Both support journaling and various features like sparse files and resource forks.
It's the painful cost of maintaining backwards compatibility.
For context, I can still install and use Winamp 2.5 from 1999 on Windows 11. That's over 25 years of backwards compatibility. Not something most people need on a daily basis but still very cool.
Raymond called it 21 years ago: when you change the insides, no one notices. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39...
And every time I format a new NTFS, the first thing I do before puting any files on it is set the drive root permissions Everyone = Full control + Replace child permissions with inheritable permissions.
Because I absolutely hate being denied access to my own files.
It's incredibly valuable to not allow anything which runs on your machine to immediately read and write anything, even on a single user system.
You can change permissions later...
One of the most baffling aspects of modern Windows is that it's ridiculously hard to tell at a glance which window is active. It used to be that the active window's title bar was bright blue, and everything else was gray. These days, I have two 2560x1440 monitors, which was unimaginable back in the day, and regularly fail to identify which window is active.
Also, the modern Alt-Tab popup often takes two full seconds to appear on my machine. I can't even imagine how they managed that.
WinUI right now is so bad that even resizing the window show partial blank area that you can see before the whole area gets repainted again.
This is just gonna get worse with even better internet connectivity in the future, and consumers jumping on it because subscriptions requires much less cash outlay than owning hardware that runs the value generating part of the app.
Then last week I got a full screen “finish setting up windows” that wants me to create a Microsoft account. I have two options: “remind me in 3 days” or “continue… and if you change your mind you can’t actually go back. You have to reboot.” So every three days I get to be interrupted by this upsell.
<long frustrated rant about what being a Big Tech engineer/designer actually signals>
To disable the "Make account" and "Remind me in 3 days" prompt on Microsoft, navigate to your Windows settings, then go to System > Notifications & actions; within the "Notifications" section, look for options related to "Suggest ways to finish setting up your device" or similar wording and toggle them off to prevent these reminders from appearing.
And that's when they're not just "pirated" themselves?
Seems at that point you might as well just skip paying whatever questionable middleman in involved if you're not concerned about abiding by TOS or license.
It didn't have to come this far. Windows 7-10 had also decent bits not just intrusive disk encryption, "duel" boot where it prevents alternate EFI boot loaders and OSes, removing "virus" .exes without even telling, millions of pointless items in file explorer and start menus except the one that one actually is after, broken search, cringeworthy verboseness, ...
[0] https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/windows-10-will-lose-se...
That seems... fine? Once upon a time, windows had a fixed support lifecycle of 10 years, and you had pay to upgrade to the latest version. Windows 10 was released in 2015 and will be supported until 2025. This is entirely in line with that. At least with windows 11 the upgrade is free.
Microsoft could easily disable the restriction is they wanted to.
If you're a tinkerer or even just some kind of traditional PC gamer Mac just isn't a fun platform because there isn't much you can do with it besides buying a newer one. For a long time Windows was a good choice for this kind of user but less so now.
The real problem with the Apple approach though is that the very highest end SoC gives only the performance of a much cheaper midrange discrete chip and does not support all the software. Unified memory is nice, but that does not make up for it.
PS video and music, let aside games, are already for power users.
However, these people also do not care about stuff like Copilot, so the question becomes: Who is Windows being developed for? Microsoft could save a bunch of money literally adding no new features and that would make both the power user and the average user happy.
Anyway, when I finally felt my Mac was getting a bit long in the tooth, I loaded Linux (Debian + XFCE in my case, but they say Linux Mint is quite Windows-ish) on my spare gaming desktop (I don't really game much anymore so it was unused), installed the apps, added some Mac-like keyboard shortcuts, and it's worked fine!
Maybe you too can slowly find cross platform alternatives to your apps, so the jump will be easy when your boiling pot gets too hot.
I switched to Linux a year ago and never looked back. It's done everything I've asked of it with minimal fuss: gaming, dev, local LLMs (accelerated on my AMD GPU), Microsoft Office (in a VM), web browsing and comms, etc. The only hiccups I've encountered are in Steam VR, which only has official support for Windows.
Windows defender is one of the best things Microsoft did for Windows. Prior to defender, the array of vendor AV solutions was a complete shit-show. Even previously useful options got bought out by the major players and stuffed full of crap-ware.
After being burned so many times I just stick to Defender and never had a single issue since (touch wood).
Other that that, I thought it was a great criticism of Windows 11.
I suspect this is the only way to actually get it to stop running. See some of the sibling comments here about how it re-enables itself. Maybe if you had the enterprise version of Windows you could do something else.
You know something is awesome when the putrid market wails like a banshee.
Adding the folder to the excluded folders didn’t work, nor did adding the compiler to the excluded process list. I ended up disabling windows defender for a while and now I’m using a dev drive which is slower than no-defender but quicker than second run with defender.
Yes it could also be trying to then virus-check all the data it's sending and receiving without my informed consent.
I'm not trying to say windows 11 is good, just that it's an odd thing to first remove the one product that is still better than the alternatives. Because as horrible as defender is, have you experienced commercial AV products?
Agreed. It's also surprisingly easy to fix - disable web search in the start menu. [0]
> Because as horrible as defender is, have you experienced commercial AV products?
yes, and they're a disgrace. I don't normally engage in baiting on here, but honestly a lot of them are worse than the viruses they protect you from. McAfee and Norton are _literally_ spyware.
At $PREV_JOB carbon black was installed over the weekend, and I was working on some performance related tasks. All my results were invalidated because of the slowdown it imparted on _everything_.
That doesn't give defender a free pass for falling from grace though.
[0] https://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2024/May/03/Speed-up-your...
I use a Remote Desktop hack to allow more than one user to be logged in at the same time (e.g. 1 on the physical terminal and 1 over RDP, officially if someone tries to RDP in, the physical user needs to log out), of course it's a hack, and WinDefender classifies this as a malware RAT. Why yes it is a remote access tool, and it's your own, why should it be blocked?
Anyway on Win10, virus and threat protection could be described as off, but clicking "manage settings", there are more toggles, some of them are on, despite the summary saying "it's off". I just looked, a thing called "Real-time protection" has the description "You can turn off this setting for a short time before it turns back on automatically.".
It's definitely not your computer... yeah yeah yeah it's for noobs, and I can probably ask ChatGPT what registry setting I need to tweak to actually turn it off. But all these lies and user hostility!
I think there's been some interesting changes on the kernel and user-space API side, but it's drowning in the UI shit show.
It's very clear usability is no longer a priority, and they change things just for the sake of change.
Is there any "long term support" windows or something that will have security updates after October?
Now they are all combinations of FreeBSD, Debian, and Endeavour.
Well... yeah? The computer is a tool. If my tool doesn't do what I want it to do, or, by extension, it does things I didn't ask for or need, then it does suck. If my tool suddenly told me that my toolbox needs another, arbitrary tool Y that I don't need (in this case, TPM), then I will look for another brand.
The fact that "most users" are ignorant doesn't mean that the users who aren't ignorant should be punished. "Most users" are capable of doing the things you listed perfectly fine on other operating systems, like macOS or the various user-friendly Linux distributions, without being treated with hostility by the OS. The argument "it does the job" doesn't really hold water - the entire IT support industry is built on Windows not doing the job when the user doesn't know "why it works" as you put it.
Does the author not remember the days when connecting an unpatched Windows system to the internet got it hax0red in minutes? And how those hax0red Windows systems were a pain for the rest of us, being spam and DDoS sources and worse? And that Microsoft fixed it? And the author doesn't want to pay taxes for roads because they don't benefit from roads because they walk to the shops? Because they are a free thining independent Linux user who doesn't understand that the shop employees drive to work and the shop stock is driven to the shop.
By becoming itself spyware.
And fixed it... Croudstrike, updates who won't install, ransomware, it even clicks on your links.
Exactly. We have strayed so far from the original path of the PC being owned by and serving its USER. Doing what the USER wants it to do. Running what the USER wants running. Upgrading when the USER wants to upgrade. I don't want my operating system to what Microsoft wants it to do, or what Apple wants it to do, or, to be fair, what Canonical wants it to do. I want it to do what I want it to do. The fact that this has become a weird "power user" point of view is scary.
Yes, if you are a new user, yes. If you happen to have some old programs around - tough luck.
You're right. I don't think "why it works". I ask myself "why it doesn't work ?". Why suddenly am i not able to tell which element is a label or a button in the UI ? Why is the scrollbar so tiny and hidden, with no possibility (Win95) to make it bigger ? Why, to resize the active window with the mouse, i have to hunt for this 1px border on my HD monitor (you can have any window border in Win95).
Oh, and Edge, new Outlook (you forgot Teams) - truly marvels of engineering. For some reasons an _-'"€€_*€ from MS had the great idea to hide old emails. Who needs access to old emails when the customer comes screeming.
TPM has been built into processors for what... 5-7 years now? What mythical "new" x64 is this individual talking about?
When I see someone arguing against TPM, it's fairly easy to write their argument off. They don't understand what it's used for or why, which is fine, but like those gamers discussing fixed page files, their opinion is just wrong.
> There's another piece of self-contradiction in that article - BitLocker uses TPM 2.0 for encryption key storage. Amazing, except, again, HOME users cannot even run this BitLocker thingie, even if they want.
The author is uninformed. Microsoft calls the Win 11 Home version "Device Encryption", essentially an unconfigurable version of Bitlocker. It's still BL under the hood.
> ut then, when you think about it, if the system has TPM and encryption, and it's configured in a "clever" way, then you can't have this lovely freedom of deleting unnecessary stuff, now can you?
Author isn't aware of dislocker. But keep on being smarmy.
Anyway, this article is hardly worth HN's time.
It still seems a arbitrary cut off for waste though. If TPM is standard enough on hardware surely adoption would happen regardless of OS requirements?
It's not TPM, Zen1 does support TPM 2. Also, its instruction set is identical to Zen+ (Ryzen 2xxx), which is supported by Win11. After all, Zen+ was just a die shrink of Zen1 with some minor fixes.
It really seems like they blacklisted Zen1 for no real reason.
> Ryzen 1700
Surely you jest.
Not good enough for win 11.
interesting. TPM as an optional feature and going forward I would be perfectly fine with. It is a forced feature no one is really asking for. That is why the pushback. Instead it is 'oh just buy a new PC'. Totally blind to the people with older PC's that are perfectly fine to continue using. But now they need to refresh and spend several hundred bucks for a feature they do not understand or care about.
Microsoft mandated TPM after gauging both user feedback and real world metrics and finding that TPM helped increase security by a significant margin. I am inclined to believe them.
Techbeards like most of the audience here have a passionate hatred for TPM whether righteously or otherwise. For everyone else in the real world, TPM is at best a security boon and at worst something you don't even know is there.
A big piece of Windows 11 is VBS, which requires TPM. It's not just device encryption, but security of core operating system components. Microsoft gets repeatedly hammered, rightfully so, for security, and VBS was the means to right-track that.
Author is both complaining about being railroaded and about being given choices paragraphs apart.
> All in all, a meaningless chapter in a meaningless story.
Author is self aware.
Five years after I got it there are very few consumer machines that are as powerful, or can address as much memory.
I know I can make it work through tricks and overrides but that's not good enough for consumers. Not hobbyists, regular people.
I'm not aware of that, either.
But since the author talks about doing this change from Linux, my Arch can handle BitLocker drives "out of the box" (meaning I didn't do anything specific to have that, I just clicked once out of curiosity on a BL drive and it worked). The only "catch" is that it requires the long key, it doesn't support password unlock AFAIK.
My laptop is that old, and my computer is a year older, and my other computer is from 2012.
Not planning to replace any of them anytime soon.
The 2012 computer has had RAM upgrades of course (it shipped with 4gb!). It has an Intel i7 4770S, and nothing it's used for saturates the CPU to even 70% utilisation multi-tasking. Most of the time it's sitting around at < 10%. So it's objectively a bad decision to upgrade it.
Making round corners on window borders. Do you know how many triangles they need for that ? Neither do I. /s
Because Windows 10 support is ending this October, I moved to Linux 2 weeks ago, and I don't think I'll be back to Windows unless it turns around.
I had a lot more to complain about in the last few years of being a Mac user.
...
Either use W10 IoT LTSC or switch to another OS entirely, it's not like w12 will fix it, so you might as well face the inevitable today
How so? Apart from a handful of edge cases that not even remotely true to being true.
Other than the shitshow online clouds that think I'm a malicious robot, Linux works absolutely great for everyday desktop/school/work use, and is generally great for games as such.
It's easier to install, easier to update, easier to manage, and easier to find useful apps for than I ever had to deal with on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android.
For complex configs and tweaking system settings Linux can be a pain, but then again, so is Windows, simply due to the sheer number of registry settings and the possibility that the OS will one day decide to override them with an update.
There is a huge gap in the middle though. Having to solve random problems you’ll have (and you most certainly will) using the terminal is just not a good experience for most users.
Do I target Wayland or X11? Do I target OpenGL or Vulkan, Deb or RPM, or one of the many App in a box (Snap, AppImage, Docker, Etc)
Don't get me wrong, its gotten better over the years, but still not at a streamlined experience as one would expect.
Don't get me started on the X11/Wayland issue, They really needed a reference composer, instead we have like what? 5? all varying their API levels they support for screen capture,
I feel bad for applications that have to do that.
Sure, but what system is free of such a generic and vague criticism?
>differences in distros are still somewhat vast.
Yes, and that’s a very positive point, isn’t it?
>Do I target Wayland or X11? Do I target OpenGL or Vulkan, Deb or RPM, or one of the many App in a box (Snap, AppImage, Docker, Etc)
That’s something the actual circumstances should mostly respond to. Is that a green field pet project? Do whatever seems most pleasing! Is that a project for some company? Don’t they already have some existing constraints?
(You don't actually need to care about Wayland if you're using a widget toolkit like GTK/QT.)
Basically target the Steam Deck.
My personal problems with Linux previously were
1- Things breaking seemingly randomly
2- Having to find alternatives to some of the software I use
3- Generally having to learn a new OS
4- Things like VR and games in general being a bit iffy
Now games and VR (4) seem to work very well, everything is a webapp so (2) should be better, (3) is unavoidable really but it's fine as long as (1) doesn't happen too much or at the wrong time.
I've decided to give it a shot again but we shall see if I finally manage to swap over. I've tried it multiple times with dual boot but the time investment isn't small and I'd get skill issue'd once or twice and just not boot to it anymore since I have the option of a fully set up Windows.
> 1- Things breaking seemingly randomly
This is/has always been the kicker; especially with security updates. If you're comfortable switching; just reinstalling in place is the 99% hammer solution to get back and running imo, and isn't that bad as a last-resort.
My HP EliteBooks G8, AMD and Intel versions, work much more reliably under Linux. The AMD will regularly lock up during sleep for some reason under Windows. Bonus points for overheating the box... This PC is more that 4 yo by now, and it's still not fixed. At least it now has a working webcam!
The Intel one had GPU issues for a good year after I bought it. It only has the integrated Intel GPU.
It’s forwards compatibility if we’re discussing the idea of the program being compatible with future versions of Windows, but that’s neither the point of what was suggested, nor is it realistic — breaking changes, or compatibility, are going to be at Microsoft’s hands and largely an intentional decision at a platform level, not something an individual developer can shore up against.
It was. A long time ago. Running old games on Windows has become challenging.