pathartl

I'm not saying Windows is infallible, but it's actually getting quite insufferable to hear nothing but the Windows hate train day in and day out as if it has no redeeming qualities and the only reason we aren't on Linux is because some game developers want nasty anti cheat/DRM measures. I think the proliferation of this is largely due in part to "Windows sucks" being an actual valid avenue of revenue for creators.

- Windows Terminal is actually pretty dang good

- There's actually a package manager built in now with WinGet

- Hyper-V comes with pro and is incredibly powerful

- While WSL2 isn't great at times, it does fill in a lot of gaps and working with Docker is pretty seamless

- Ever since Windows Defender became standard, cleaning up relative's machines has basically turned into disabling some startup apps and removing spyware-like browser extensions

- With 11 the UI actually feels reasonably consistent for the first time in a long while. There's still some core applications that need a rewrite (Disk Management, Format, RegEdit, Device Manager, Event Viewer), but it feels like real progression when compared to 8/8.1 or 10

- Backwards compatibility is quite simply unmatched

There's some areas that have regressed or have been omitted for _some reason_:

- If you're going to push Microsoft 365 family subscriptions, I never want to have to download TeamViewer, AnyDesk, etc. Give me some capable remote assistance tool. It's obvious this is ignored so they don't piss off partners.

- NTP synchronization shouldn't be behind the location access permission. I understand why it is, but then make location access more granular.

- Disk performance could be much better

- NTFS is so antiquated. It's time for another filesystem. I want native overlay support, checksumming, not-ass permissions (though tbf nobody gets this right)

- Windows + D is just a key shift to the right from ctrl C so I hit it all the time. It would be less infuriating if hitting it again actually put all of the windows in their previous state / stacking order.

- I usually sign in with my Microsoft account when I setup my PC, but ffs let me create a local user. If you want to put signing into my Microsoft account in my face, do it at first login not at first setup.

I have a pair of Airpod Pros that I use solely for audiobooks and podcasts when I'm doing chores or shopping, but the audio quality is so garbage that's all they're really good for.

Again, some of these are on 10, but on 11 it feels like more of a tighter package.

This is way out of date. I have since been able to get it working on a Windows 11 4th gen Intel machine with 64-bit drivers cobbled together from a couple of versions of FlexColor and some .inf modification. It's not flawless, there's some major corruption that can occur when trying to use certain operations, but overall it works for my needs.

Even then, there's so many other things that can go wrong with games. With DOS-era titles, DOSBox does a pretty fantastic job, as long as you use a fork with useful features like DOSBox-X. With Windows titles the possibilities to preserve games is almost endless thanks to hooking. I've spent the past few years compiling a personal archive of games to get them in a playable state. For me, this often involves support for modern controllers and _at least_ natively rendering at a higher resolution. Compatibility shims like dgVoodoo make it easy to bump up the rendering resolution of a game, while preserving aspect ratio for games that may only support 4:3.

Graphics are basically solved with projects like dgVoodoo, and there's numerous dinput -> xinput solutions out there, but that's rarely the whole picture. WinSock could really benefit from a wrapper that tunnels traffic over the internet (VPNs are really like using a steam roller to drive a nail). Registry API calls really could be redirected to read from config files instead of relying on the weird bastardization of WOW64 and the VirtualStore. Hell, even file access could be redirected so we can contain all of a game's files.

I'm actually working towards implementing the latter two as a way to preserve the functionality of installers and allow their reimplementation through something like PowerShell.