For my personal computers I was actually buying Windows licenses up to and including Windows 10, but now I switched to alternative acquisition methods again, and mostly run Windows in VMs with GPU pass-through and disabled networking. Just an honest relationship - they don't respect me, I don't respect them.
The good thing about Windows 11 requiring TPM is, that's the easiest way to prevent an unintentional upgrade. Typically you can disable TPM in the bios and prevent the OS from updating itself . Which i did as soon as i heard about that requirement :-)
Wild to me that a company can work on a product for twenty years, have multiple releases, and not have made any significant improvements to it beyond updated hardware support.
Like, y'all could just do a 25th Anniversary Edition of Windows 2000 and people would go ape shit for it.
Arguably, especially in the 8/10/11 era, few of these features are things that meaningfully enhance the user experience. Incredibly, we're still running NTFS and dealing with hacks on hacks on hacks. In the 8 era, a huge number of massive projects were started, promoted, and mothballed.
> It still has a far more capable permissions model than any Linux filesystem.
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.
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.
>Incredibly, we're still running NTFS and dealing with hacks on hacks on hacks.
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.
>> 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 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.
Yes all those Wikipedia articles only mention three things. Three things is all Microsoft did in twenty years. And they are all bad therefore Microsoft bad.
Yeah, as far as my experience is concerned, all that most of those releases did was fragment configuration, introduce the concepts of ads in your operating system, and innovate some in-fucking-scrutable technology that require me to continuously uninstall Candy Crush.
I think it's more looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, and forgetting that some of the things that have improved over the past decades wern't always that way.
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.
It is the rise of anti-intellectualism. It's the lack of good-faith. It's the promulgation of lies instead of truths, without even caring they are lies as long as they attack the right people. It's the idea "it takes a lot of work to make it look easy" being replaced with "if it looks easy you must not be working".
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?
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?)
Not honoring previous settings, reverting back to whatever is more convenient for Microsoft or trying to push down of our throats Copilot on every single corner might be the most infuriating thing....
The "location override" feature that the author complains about does not allow apps to access location even when it's turned off. Instead, it gives apps a way to change your reported location; e.g. Remote Desktop can change your reported location to match the remote computer you're accessing.
The Windows 11 Explorer titlebar is always colored depression-gray
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.
Oh, but it gets better than all the windows being the same color! Sometimes, even though the taskbar shows your window as active and you have the blinking cursor in a text area, typing won't type until you click that window!
Any window that is based on good old Win32 API title bar will have proper title bar accent color (ex: Run dialog) BUT the new generation of WinUI based windows wont have this coz it looks like they render their own "header bar" or something.
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.
Microsoft knows this and therefore focuses more on cloudifying all your apps, I.e. your windows Pc becomes a thin client for Microsoft hosted services, ensuring infinite revenue.
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.
Glad to hear they solved this all nitty point, so with these infinite revenue there will be an infinite amount of resources to trickle down to the rest of humanity! Right?
I have a legal copy of Win 11 and after very carefully scraping all the garbage off of it, I had a gaming and general use system that felt… fine I guess… for months.
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.
Insane how people are still using anything other than illegitimate LTSC copies. They keep spitting in your face and you keep taking it? They are not getting a single cent from me, they can rot in hell for all I care for. Give me back my Windows 7 experience...
I'm glad Dell Refurbished only sells workstations with Windows 10 Pro. It's not a pleasant experience but still way better than Windows 11. I wish they had Windows LTSC though.
Not to be too pedantic, but aren't those typically being purchased under some other license that doesn't apply to you (bulk, oem, cheaper country, etc) and then resold in violation of the licensing terms?
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.
I haven't read the entire EULA to be 100% sure, but Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 can be found with MS solution partners so I don't think they would be in violation with M$.
One only needs to look at growth figures (Azure and OpenAI positive, Windows and Xbox negative) to understand Windows' trajectory against end users. Already Windows 10 22H2 (?), supposedly largely identical to Windows 11, has mindlessly shuffled setting dialogs and stuff around to confuse users and make switching off Windows updates (and "telemetry" gathering and ads) practically impossible save for disabling networking, even "Pro" versions. Fortunately there's Proton/Wine/Steam to save gaming.
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, ...
The reason for the TPM requirement (I heard, anyway) was so they could dump a decade or so’s worth of compatability fixes. Which is fine, but dropping support for Windows 10 is just gouging from organisations who require support, and potentially leaving consumers who are ‘just fine’ with their PC and Windows 10 without security fixes - [0] ‘Windows 10 will lose security support in October 2025’
>Which is fine, but dropping support for Windows 10 is just gouging from organisations who require support, and potentially leaving consumers who are ‘just fine’ with their PC and Windows 10 without security fixes - [0]
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.
I hate where Microsoft is going, but there is no obvious alternative. I am not go to be paying hundreds of dollars markup for RAM/SSDs and limiting myself to a single GPU vendor by switching to Apple. I am very hesitant to deal with desktop linux bullshit, but Windows 11 may just be the thing to push me over the edge. I know there are great people at Microsoft who know what “the right thing” is for the people who actually care about the platform, but it seems that nowadays they do not have the required ownership.
Apple's (much more) slowly going down to the same "profit over users" road. A year or so ago I started slowly migrating from Apple-only apps to cross-platform apps. Fortunately my main hobbies are YouTube and software side projects so this was pretty easy.
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.
Having skipped over Vista and Windows 8, my hope is that 11 is another one of those versions where they throw crap at the wall that will not stick to the next version. On the other hand, Windows 10 still has things I considered unacceptable, which I ended up accepting begrudgingly. Perhaps that is the whole strategy.
That's the very point of this discussion: not everybody cares abut the platform. As long browsing and office work, half (or more) of the population would never know a Windows from a Mac. And they shouldn't either.
PS video and music, let aside games, are already for power users.
It does not take a power user to notice that the system has become more sluggish and more annoying, the average user just is not that vocal about it.
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.
I’m puzzled. On the one hand you don’t want the complexity of a Linux desktop, but you want the hassle that comes with changing GPUs. Over the life of a typical machine is it really worth upgrading the GPU separately?
Upgrading a GPU is not much of a hassle on an ordinary desktop, you open the case and plug it in, at worst you also need to upgrade the PSU. And you do that maybe once during the lifetime of the machine.
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.
For me the answer is yes. It has been more important than upgrading the processor or anything else. But this depends upon your use case.
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.
>I am very hesitant to deal with desktop linux bullshit, but Windows 11 may just be the thing to push me over the edge.
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.
If the first thing someone does is find a way to remove Windows Defender, I'm going to assume they're too clever for their own good.
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.
I agree windows defender was an absolute game changer, but have you used it in Win11? I upgraded a fairly beefy workstation from win10 to win11 and immediately started to see 10-15x slowdowns on the first run of a task after boot. Things that took 20 seconds were taking 3-4 minutes. I took an etl trace and discovered it was windows defender. Subsequent runs were about
20% worse than on win10.
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.
Windows 11 is horribly slow at everything it does. It's borderline unusable. Just hitting the windows key and typing "notepad" and hitting enter has gone from something that was near instant in windows XP to something that takes 30 seconds and only sometimes might be successful. I'm assuming it's waiting for network requests to send off what I'm typing to bing/cortana/etc before giving me the result I want.
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?
> Just hitting the windows key and typing "notepad" and hitting enter has gone from something that was near instant in windows XP to something that takes 30 seconds and only sometimes might be successful
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.
I also think Defender is the best AV solution. At the same time, it's a completely useless software, so there's no reason to leave it running. You both can be right. :)
But WinDefender lies... it can claim to be off, but some parts are still active.
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!
And their method of removing it is by deleting folders?! Even though they definitely know Windows is not like Linux where "everything is a file". I'm actually surprised it booted.
Other that that, I thought it was a great criticism of Windows 11.
> And their method of removing it is by deleting folders?!
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.
So true. Every commercial anti-virus software I tried has let me down. From letting viruses in, to damaging the system by itself and causing loss of data. It's like anti-virus software were viruses themselves.
After being burned so many times I just stick to Defender and never had a single issue since (touch wood).
sigh I can't wait for Windows to annoy blind developers enough so that they switch to Linux, and hammer it into shape for us users. Windows just has the best support for blind people. I mean it's falling to entropy with every release, but screen readers hold things up as much as they can. Luckily even File Explorer has gotten so slow that Microsoft starts sending messages to screen readers "working on it..." to let us know just how inefficient Windows Maybe it won't be too much longer.is.
yeah, I've been forced onto it by corporate on my windows machine.. from an aesthetic and usability point of view, there's only negatives.. the ui is even worse than 10, flat and featureless and ugly, looks like a bad prototype theme for gnome, 20 years ago.
They somehow managed to take the utter mess that were the settings of windows 10 and redefine the word utter to a new low.
I'm sure there's some technical things in the kernel and system API that needed changing, but somehow I feel like they could have done that without changing anything that's on the screen..
I wonder if they actually put the thought and consideration into windows user experience that they did when they designed Chicago.
Someone who had worked on the inside commented here that the Windows 10 design team didn't even use Windows, and things suddenly made so much more sense.
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.
Yeah, this pretty much sums up the Windows 11 experience—bloated, slow, and packed with features no one asked for. The fact that Microsoft is doubling down on hardware requirements despite clear pushback just shows how out of touch they are. TPM might have some theoretical security benefits, but for home users? Totally irrelevant.
Such a low hanging fruit for EU to slap a massive fine on Microsoft. Surely what they are trying to do is at odds with climate goals. We should be reusing equipment as much as possible, not buying new.
Can only see a case when new equipment might be energy efficient, but not clear when actual benefit would materialise (e.g. cost of disposal, emissions to make new equipment etc.)
I stopped reading when he uninstalled defender. Is the best thing ms did to windows!
OP is like the 90% of linux users: if it doesn't do what he wants him to do, it sucks. Like you said most users don't care about TMP, they also don't care about who is protecting them, what interface it is, how printers work, how office works, how browsers work. This is why windows is/was successful, you start it, open outlook, mail, browser, print, play games, etc. Without ever thinking why it works.
Does windows suck? Probably, but it does the job and is enough for 99% of the home users.
Also if someone wants to personalize windows check reddit, you can change almost everything.
> This is why windows is/was successful, you start it, open outlook, mail, browser, print, play games, etc. Without ever thinking why it works.
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.
> if it doesn't do what he wants him to do, it sucks
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.
> "Also, security, as we see every day, is all about backend infrastructure, like telcos not getting hax0red, amirite, and not about home users. After all, in my three decades of computing, 100% of harm to my "computing estate" came from companies being lax with their data in their "clouds", not from any movie-like hax0rology on my local systems."
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.
I don't follow. They didn't fix it by installing ads in the start menu, making the command prompt take 4 second to load or constantly moving all the settings around. The fixed those things with security patches, which back then weren't even force bundled with packs of crappy features.
> 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.
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.
> But the TPM nonsense potentially marks even rather new and ultra-powerful computers as unsuitable for the upgrade.
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.
I had a Ryzen 1700 that didn't meet the windows 11 tpm standard. It was still working well for everything I threw at it, but I guess a little short of "modern".
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?
> I had a Ryzen 1700 that didn't meet the windows 11 tpm standard.
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.
what benchmark is it failing to match up to? other than AI work I can't think of a use case for a home machine where it would really be even noticeably slow. certainly it's fine for compiling code and etc. 2017 doesn't really seem old to me since improvements in chips has slowed down.
I don't have a dog in this race because I haven't used Windows as my primary OS since the Windows 8 days, but my main "makin money" computer, a threadripper 3970X workstation is not officially supported by Windows 11.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>It is a forced feature no one is really asking for.
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.
> Author isn't aware of dislocker. But keep on being smarmy.
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.
> Why would this be an option even? Why allow apps to override a PRIVACY setting? It's like saying, you're allergic to peanuts, but ALLOW waiters to ignore your request, cor. This is becoming so ridiculous I'm struggling to find words to describe my utter disdain and contempt for these low-IQ games.
Author is both complaining about being railroaded and about being given choices paragraphs apart.
> All in all, a meaningless chapter in a meaningless story.
I was thinking the same thing myself - Windows 11 needs 10x more powerful hardware than, say, Win XP, but doesn't noticeably provide any new features. Where's all the processing power going?
I've been unimpressed with the direction that Windows has been taking for 15-ish years. Aero glass was one of the best-looking UIs ever, but it was thrown out. Windows 10 was tolerable for me, but the reports of what's been happening in the beta channels is disturbing. Telemetry has been there for a while, and I took steps to stop it, but I despise ads (suggested/recommended apps are practically ads). I don't think any sane person asked for a screenshotting AI that you could ask for your credit card info. The people in charge of Windows are out of touch with what everyday people actually want from it.
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 for one am quite happy with Windows these days. I started out on Windows (3.1!) switched to Mac in 2009 for over a decade and have mostly been back on Windows the last few years.
I had a lot more to complain about in the last few years of being a Mac user.
Isn’t backwards compatibility one of the tentpole features of Windows? If you meant future versions of apps, sure, but I’d otherwise not expect this to be a problem in any significant sense.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. It’s backwards compatibility if a given version of say, Photoshop, designed to run on Windows N, now runs on Windows N+1 as well… at least from the perspective of the OS, which is what we’re discussing?
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.
Genuinely not trying to move goalposts here, but I feel like games have always been the exception, due in part to their reliance on so many of-the-time technologies, at least for AAA titles. Either way yours is a fair point. I still think the original point broadly holds for more traditional programs though.
Honestly, this is one of the biggest boons for Linux. If your stuff isn't gonna work on Win11 and it isn't gonna work on Linux, so either way you need to make a change, then why not pick Linux? The barrier to entry for Win11 is much closer to the barrier to entry for Linux now in terms of program compatibility, so it's an easier choice than it's been in the past. (obviously I'm still not gonna recommend Linux to someone who uses Autodesk products or is very heavily invested into Adobe or needs some niche windows programs that don't run elsewhere)
The barrier to entry is definitely still lower for Win11. I could install it and be productive in it day 1.
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.
I agree with all your points, except for 1. That is largely related to the quality of the hardware, and it can bite you under Windows, too.
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.
Unless you have very specific applications that require* windows; desktop linux has been a great alternative for a decade or longer I think.
> 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.
VR is still kinda iffy if you have a Quest; it's possible to get a Quest working but definitely more difficult than most users would tolerate. I believe "normal" PCVR headsets (Valve Index, Bigscreen Beyond, etc.) should work pretty well though.
I ditched Windows when 7 went EOL. I've been using Linux for years now.
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.
Yes. Linux can work well for people who need nothing besides a browser and maybe minimal doc. editing. Also for people on the opposite side of the scale.
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.
For everyday stuff in 2025, if your browser works, you can be 90% productive in any OS.
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.
Eh, Linux can still be a crap shoot depending on what you are trying to do. differences in distros are still somewhat vast.
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,
>Eh, Linux can still be a crap shoot depending on what you are trying to do.
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?
Like league of legends with their amazing anticheat kernel driver that also requires tpm. Not sure how this thing is gdpr compliant. It is way too invasive.
