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Comment by GnarfGnarf | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty.

(My customer demographic is seniors & casual users).

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Curious: do enterprises using Windows suffer through all the system-level ads and nagware? Or do they get a version that lets their employees actually focus on work instead of learning the many reasons they should consider switching back to Edge?

Enterprise and ltsc have none of the nagware or tracking. Ai is still there though

You _can_ curate the Enterprise edition a lot more with group policy/intune and remove all that stuff but my experience has been most corporate IT departments don’t care/don’t know how to do it, and MS will just randomly enable new things without asking the same as home editions and you have to keep an eye on it and go to disable them.

It’s super annoying!

No nagware but, at least on the machines of my colleagues, an even worse enemy: Microsoft Defender with all the checkboxes ticked. Grinds the machine to an absolute halt for any development work - sometimes the responsible security department has mercy and gives exceptions for certain folders/processes, sometimes not.

My work machine is grossly slow due to all the various security software.

Loading Teams can take minutes. I'm often late to meetings waiting for the damn thing to load.

Feels like early 90s computing and that Moore's Law was an excuse for bad coding practices and pushing newer hardware so that "shit you don't care about but is 'part of the system'" can do more monitoring and have more control of 'your' computer.

From my tests defender has minimal impact on performance even when doing a full scan, except for making some io slower when you're e.g. unpacking new files but NTFS is plenty slow by itself there

Enterprise likes to layer multiple invasive security products though that'll do a lot worse than defender

It’s all turned on by default even in Windows 11 Enterprise. You can turn everything off via AD Group Policy or your MDM but you have to go through the labyrinth of Windows policies and find them all. Thankfully you only have to do it once and then push it to all of your devices.

I run Win11 LTSC and the OS largely just stays out of my way.

In fact when I read threads like this complaining about Windows, I have to remind myself that most people aren't running LTSC.

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