I’ve given up on a one computer solution. I am currently on multiple computers. One thinkpad and an old dell optiplex run Fedora. Main desktop runs Windows. I can still ssh into my old dell optiplex from my windows desktop with its nice windows 11 power shell terminal. I can switch over to my thinkpad t490s and use Fedora with gnome (and still ssh into my dell optiplex because all of them are on the same home Internet connection and router (and same switch other than the thinkpad).One thing I’ve noticed is remmina isn’t quite the same as mstsc windows Remote Desktop but I think it is high praise that I could even get to the point of someday expecting it…

Honestly there is absolutely no reason to not switch to something else. Mac&#x27;s have Office and Photoshop, and I haven&#x27;t personally ran into any games I can&#x27;t play on Linux.Shame that Microsoft haven&#x27;t given Linux Office 365, because Microsoft ♥ Linux. Right?

I use Ubuntu (as stock as possible) for my media center PC, here are some reasons off the top of my head that prevent me from using desktop Linux for anything more serious:Bluetooth connection to my headset sometimes causes the entire system to hard lock, requiring physical reset.Sound sometimes goes static-y, have to reboot to fix.I had to download a third party tweaker app to disable a sound output device that I didn&#x27;t want to use.Tearing of full screen video, I don&#x27;t even remember how I fixed it.A notification about something called &quot;snap store&quot; keeps coming up and needs a command line fix to dismiss.The built-in app store keeps notifying me about a firmware update for my wireless keyboard. I&#x27;m not interested, and there is no way to dismiss it.Firefox on Linux has an obnoxious habit of refusing to open a new tab until I restart it for updates (that were installed automatically, not through the system updates app). Sure, I want my browser up-to-date, but this is not an issue on Windows where it will never force you to restart the application. I looked around why this is the way it is, and the answers were that it had to do with how Linux works.And, yeah, games.

MacOS requires that I purchase apple hardware at absurd brand markup, so that’s out.I use Linux at work because I have good IT support and I don’t rely on any windows only software. Neither are the case at home.

For me, it&#x27;s Visual Studio. I&#x27;m thinking about trying a windows 8 vm with VS2019 though.

Well, yeah. It&#x27;s less of a hassle to run games on Windows. Also, in my case, photoshop and Lightroom.So, as another poster said, my solution is to have two pcs. A laptop with Linux I use basically all the time, and a desktop with an actual GPU for when I want to play or mess around with my photography.This arrangement works well enough, since for my everyday needs the iGPU is more than enough, and I would rather not lug around a 10-pound brick with a dedicated GPU. And, in my particular situation, it&#x27;s actually cheaper since my desktop is a hand-me-down from work which only required a new GPU, which at the time was beefier and cheaper than what I could have had in a laptop.

I have recently put Fedora with KDE on my work laptop and here are a couple of reasons off the top of my head (I believe I have come across more, but can&#x27;t remember them right now) why I&#x27;m currently not considering switching from W10 on my home stuff:- I don&#x27;t game that much anymore, but yeah, I hear games are still far from 100% on Linux.- There are various graphical issues linked to fractional scaling (I think), such as random lines appearing near the edges of windows or windows leaving behind lines when being dragged around, etc.- My external monitor doesn&#x27;t appear to be affected by energy management settings (dimming&#x2F;sleeping after some time, etc.) whatsoever.- There is no option to disable the touchpad when a mouse is connected.- Middle mouse button is paste instead of autoscroll with seemingly no global way to change it (I wonder who came up with THAT genius bit of UX).- A lot of things can still only be achieved via the terminal.

Even though I&#x27;ve been using Linux desktops for 20 years, for me it&#x27;s mostly CAD, BIM and 3D design apps still keeping me at least partially &#x27;stuck&#x27; on windows

I have a NUC with KDE Neon on it as a second desktop. It&#x27;s been pretty good so been thinking it might be time soon to switch my main over.However for years the main thing holding me back is the lack of a proper RDP alternative. And yes I&#x27;ve tried them all, nothing comes close to RDP on Windows.I use it all the time to connect home from work, so I can separate work from personal stuff, as well as from my laptop when I&#x27;m away. I just have Firefox installed on my laptop, RDP takes care of the rest.

What&#x27;s this year&#x27;s lock-in &#x2F; excuse... games?

I held the same belief until I made the switch. First on my work laptop, then at some point I realized I&#x27;m not using my Windows machine at all, now I only have Windows VMs for the rare occasion that I need to run something on it.

It&#x27;s gets easier and easier every year to want an alternative to Windows, but it remains impossible to actually switch, at least for me.

We are at the point where windows is irresponsible and those declutter tools are what the responsible user makes use of. You are irresponsible for not using them.

Windows doesn&#x27;t have a keylogger, and irresponsible &#x27;declutter&#x27; tools can do more hard than good.

&gt; Legislation is usually too little and too late, heavy-handed, and hard to change.Often EU regulations, especially tech-related ones (e.g. the USB C one) come with baked in provisions for how it will be updated to stay relevant in the future.The upcoming DMA and DSA will hopefully enable a lot more interoperability and interchangeable software and standards.Microsoft&#x27;s Windows bullshit (the EU already established they can&#x27;t force you to use their browser, why are they allowed to do it once again) will need a heavy slap down too.&gt; Many people in tech, and especially americans, sneer at the thought of regulation, but I don&#x27;t see any other way to un-fuck the most popular personal computer OS in the market.The only people who sneer generically at regulation are people who either misunderstanding or are just oblivious to how much their lives are shaped (in probably 90% of the cases, even in the US), for the better by existing regulations. One can argue on the merits of a specific proposal or law, but otherwise it&#x27;s just absurdity like a house cat.

I think you are right. Many people in tech, and especially americans, sneer at the thought of regulation, but I don&#x27;t see any other way to un-fuck the most popular personal computer OS in the market.If not for GDPR, my email and phone would be still vacuumed up by every e-shop and sold in bulk to some shady data aggregator. If not for the upcoming USB-C charger law, Apple would be putting their Lightning holes in all devices. Sometimes the invisible hand of the market has to be forced I guess.Legislation is usually too little and too late, heavy-handed, and hard to change. But it&#x27;s better then the current state of things, where the users are constantly screwed with no viable alternative for their OS.

No idea which of the builtin keyloggers they&#x27;re referring to, but the one with the most public outrage was the inking and typing personalization feature.

Presumably &quot;Inking and typing personalization&quot;. Microsoft collects all the words you type, presumably filters out the ones that match the dictionary, and collects things like names in your Microsoft account. This can be used for spell check and turning stylus-drawn shapes into text more accurately.So yes, Windows does collect some information akin to a keylogger.

Sorry, “built in keylogger?” Which one is that?

&gt; Tracking and privacy on Windows is becoming atrociousIt is pathetic how they promote (push like madman) telemetry as a tool for improving user experience while all it is used for is ruining it and exploit their paying users for their own benefit only (marketing).

Doesn’t group policy editor fix all of this?

Tracking and privacy on Windows is becoming atrocious, I didn&#x27;t know about the built in keylogger until I ran a declutter tool.Unpopular opinion but to stop Microsoft&#x27;s shenanigans = legislation. Opt-in by default would be a good start. Transparency tools to show what&#x27;s being exported to MS. How about stopping forced major updates too.User needs protective legislation fast.

One has reason to expect ads on a website, but not on their OS.

&gt; The stories come courtesy of Microsoft’s MSN content network, which syndicates content from hundreds of web publishers: some reputable, some less so. Full disclosure: Our parent company, Future Plc, has a syndication agreement with MSN and many of its sites, including Tom’s Hardware, occasionally have articles appear on the network. What’s problematic here, though, is not that MSN syndicates content but that it often pushes the equivalent of the Weekly World News table of contents right into the Windows operating system where it can be hard to avoid.

The difference is: I paid for Windows, but I didn&#x27;t pay for tomshardware.com.

Worth noticing..  the site also still works fine with ad block enabled and there was no nag screen or paywall around it.

Every time I see the unfiltered web, it is a glimpse into how the &#x27;other side&#x27; must live. It is surreal to imagine how anyone accepts this as &#x27;normal&#x27; but somehow they manage to survive.

Unfortunately about the same ratio on that imgur link as well.

i tried turning off my adblocker and yeahhhh the ads-to-content ratio is a bit out of control <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Dre5HJw.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Dre5HJw.jpeg</a>

Story time :
A couple of years ago, i got a message from Mozilla about a survey&#x2F;competition for Indian users to find websites which had the most number of trackers. The top winners would get a coupon worth a couple of bucks.I immediately embarked on my search with safeties off - Noscript, Ublock, disabledI surfed through various Indian websites - times of india, yellow journalism websites, local language tabloids, desi xxx sites - I expanded my search globally- dailymail, cnet, piratebay - my cpu fans whining in protest as i trawled through the darkest, most malware-infested, crypto-miner-laden, chumbox-ridden corners of the web. The average number of trackers was now in the triple digits but still i felt i could do better. That i had seen worse. Suddenly,it clicked. I could almost feel time stop and spacetime warp around me as my dsl connection struggled to load up tomshardware.com. Ding Ding, My quest had ended by a healthy margin.So thanks for the coffee, tomshardware.com

What is this childish &#x27;he does bad things so it is ok others do bad things too&#x27; dumbness please? Are you really trying to protect a bad practice you know is bad because this is a common bad things so bad thing should be accepted? Really? Because this is what sounds like.Also, analogy between a sometimes visited scoped web page and the operating system that you use 100% of time when your computer is on and is the foundation of any activity? Are you mad?Are you perhaps distracted from the message by those awful annoyances, ironicaly demonstrating the harmful nature of those in Windows too inadvertently?

idk, i think &#x27;tomshardware.com&#x27; needs a reality check. there&#x27;s like 100 disgusting taboola and google ads on their own website that look identical to these awful microsoft ads. its hard to take a rant about trashy ads seriously coming from a page that is littered with them.

That would probably reduce the success ratio of their pageview and ad impression metrics. There probably is not a metric tracking quality or societal benefit.

The German version of every US website seems to greatly lack moderation.

People that comment on news websites tend to be kooks, trolls and those old people that love posting terrible memes on Facebook.

MSN also needs to actually moderate their comment sections. Too many tinfoil hats, trolls and far right extremists on the German version.

Windows can be good, when its in vm-jello, frozzen in time, with no real network connection except for shared folders and the  updaterapeware removed. 
Honestly, has anyone ever looked at these updates and though to themselves - &quot;Yes, i need that!&quot;.

Gaming on linux has really taken off. Very few games, even with anti cheat for multiplayer, don’t work. It’s nice that running Linux is no worse than missing out on console exclusives

has been the case for me for more than 5 years.

Once Infrastructure Week is finished ... just a little bit longer

You can even install PowerShell for your command line and you&#x27;ll feel right at home!

I can run pretty much any game out of the box, even random games that nobody would ever have optimised for linux.The time of the desktop has come.

I&#x27;m sure that&#x27;s never been said before

This will surely be the year of the Linux desktop.

&gt; Plus the random assortment of windows programs for which there could be a Linux equivalent but you really need that one that only works on Windows for some reason.This!What keeps me working on Windows (besides the fact that I somehow have completely missed the in-OS ads) is the time it would take me to replace all the random little quality of life apps that I&#x27;ve gotten used to. I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s a great Linux clipboard manager that does everything Ditto does on Windows but I don&#x27;t have to go and find it, get used to it, figure out all the quirks (and the things it lacks that Ditto provides, and all the things that it provides that Ditto lacks, etc, etc).

As a long-time Linux user, I have to wonder how much better my life would be if I had access to all of these. My naive guess is about 0%.

I think the Unreal Engine editor supports Linux now? This page seems to claim so: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unrealengine.com&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;download" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unrealengine.com&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;download</a>Not that this takes away from your overall point.

I know it&#x27;s not the same, but both of these games can be played on cloud gaming (Geforce Now).I have a subscription to GFN, not to play games not supported on Linux but to play on max specs without needing an expensive rig, and both Genshin Impact and Fortnite are supported there.Anyway, it&#x27;s never going to be a full drop-in replacement. Like you can&#x27;t just replace your XBOX with a Playstation and play the same games. But still, Linux is a very valid option even for gaming.

Sadly there&#x27;s still a few very heavy hitters that make Linux a no-go for some.Genshin Impact and Fortnite are unusable.Unreal Editor requires Windows too.And I don&#x27;t know how usable VR is on Windows.Plus the random assortment of windows programs for which there could be a Linux equivalent but you really need that one that only works on Windows for some reason.But at this point it&#x27;s just a matter of time, I guess.

Nah, tried all of those and settled on Mate.IMO the most important aspect of a desktop environment is that you never notice it. That&#x27;s what I loved so much about Windows 2000 (and why I lamented every UI change they made since then).

MATE is a fork of Gnome 2. Not everyone likes Gnome 3 and newer versions.

The beauty is that they can do that on their own time. Possibly even never.I use i3wm and a split ergonomic keyboard. I use a shell instead of a file manager. I am fine with 99% of people never doing that, so long as I can.

Wait until you give up on mate (kinda stuck approach to copy windows 95, just like modern windows or Mac mostly does) and try actual modern desktops like Gnome, KDE or if you want to go ultra productive something tiling like 3wm

There are warts, like it got confused into thinking that my second SSD was a removable device until I forced it in the fstab. But the level of annoyance nowadays is pretty much on par with Windows warts and annoyances (especially Windows printer drivers OMG).But I&#x27;ve been using Linux desktops for years on my laptops and virtual desktops, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect before changing my PC over.But for games I&#x27;m completely intolerant of annoyances, which is why I took so long with this step.

It definitely has a performance impact, and sometimes there are crash&#x2F;other glitches in proton not present on windows.I also have much, much less time than I did as a teenager, so I can only stomach console gaming at this point. Games need to Just Work.

For me personally performance with Linux gaming is much less of a problem than it was with teenage me&#x27;s Windows gaming. Back in the day I didn&#x27;t have much money, but today I can just buy a slightly beefier GPU to compensate any possible performance loss from compatibility layers.With my 7 year old GTX 1080 and Ubuntu&#x2F;Steam Proton I can still play most games at very high settings (except raytracing stuff).

I&#x27;d like to believe that, but can&#x27;t shake the feeling there is a chance of performance impact or a need for special magic dance to make something work.The teenager me would have no problem, he had a (fairly) working Enlightenment config and tried an array of distros, and it was fun to tinker. But he had way, way more time, and didn&#x27;t spend his own money on the gaming hardware.

Wait for a couple of major version updates before praising prematurely.Usually desktop Linux works great until it suddenly doesn&#x27;t, and then the real fun of figuring out what&#x27;s wrong begins ;)

Steam wants to sell me video games that are similar to other video games I like and keep me on top of new releases. recommendations based on purchase history are kinda okay in my opinion.Microsoft wants to sell me the british royalty and reasons why millions of people are excited about german hearing aids. I don&#x27;t really get this at all. What is their snoopware even good for if this is the best they can come up with?

So, people complain about Windows spyware and antifeatures, then they install Ubuntu and Steam client. What did that solve? Move your profiling data to someone else?

The unity dash thing is ancient and not a thing anymore.

I would definitely recommend Linux Mint over vanilla Ubuntu. Canonical has made some really dumb moves over the last decade. Thankfully, it&#x27;s trivial to avoid vanilla Ubuntu.

Is it though? When you run apt upgrade you are nagged to go subscribe to UBUNTU PRO. There was a problem with amazon tracking Ubuntu store purchases. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.howtogeek.com&#x2F;126995&#x2F;how-to-disable-the-amazon-search-ads-in-ubuntus-unity-dash&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.howtogeek.com&#x2F;126995&#x2F;how-to-disable-the-amazon-s...</a>) You can&#x27;t exactly escape telemetry and unwanted ads. Seems like it on a slippery slope to another version of Windows 10 to me.

I finally made the switch to Ubuntu Mate on Friday and WOW, color me impressed!The only reason I stuck with Windows on my desktop machine for so long was gaming, and the last time I tried switching over was 10 years ago. Spoiler: it was a shitshow.This time, things are MUCH better! The Mate desktop environment is simple, stable, clean, does the job and gets out of your way (kinda reminds me of Windows 2000). Steam&#x27;s Proton makes running games a breeze. All of my favorites just work. I could even run battle.net as a non-steam game, USING Steam&#x27;s Proton!And the kicker? Blizzard&#x27;s recently opened beta of Diablo 4 just worked. As in, I clicked install, clicked play, and it just worked. Perfectly. As if I were still running under Windows. I&#x27;ve never before seen such sorcery.So bye bye Windows, except when I&#x27;m running one as a VM.

Yep. It’s also just plain noise. eg it announces earnings are out and there is an accident on the highway.I don’t have a car and no idea which company’s earnings they think I care about. Nobody takes a step back and wonders whether it makes senseFeels like a real design by committee decision

The microsoft org chart comes to mind: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bonkersworld.net&#x2F;organizational-charts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bonkersworld.net&#x2F;organizational-charts</a>

There is a viral clip of Lebron James saying he doesn&#x27;t pay for spotify premium. If a multi millionaire can justify going through the friction of the free software, you can argue masses feel the same way. 
An app&#x2F;service with frictionless UX that requires subscription&#x2F;fees is just going  have a very small percentage of users. A developer&#x2F;small team may be content with that, but VC funded outfits are advised and need to have a massive growth of user to justify further rounds. So the app&#x2F;service has to be free with ads&#x2F;other dark patterns to boost engagement&#x2F;revenue. (exceptions that come to mind are netflix but even they have an ad tier now)

Presumably, the teams who develop the OS do want to give us a smooth user experience and help us to be productive and efficient. But between us and them are other teams tasked with extracting the maximum value from Windows users and increasing engagement with Microsoft&#x27;s shittier services.The same thing happens in web development. The developers and designers of news sites don&#x27;t want to create an unusable mess of ads and auto-playing videos, but the business development guys love that shit.

Enterprises have their own edition which leaves Pro to be just prosumer.

I have Enterprise 11 on a non managed device and I can&#x27;t really recognise many of the comments here. No news or pre-loaded spam apps. It&#x27;s actually a pretty good experience.

&gt; I&#x27;d assume enterprise customers (the real &quot;pros&quot;) will have their IT department deal with removing all the crap and adjusting the group policy so the experience is somewhat productive.Ha ha ha. You know what happens when you &quot;assume,&quot; right? I work for a Fortune 250 with 30K employees. We just &quot;upgraded&quot; the fleet at the start of the year. We&#x27;re getting all the crap by default. It takes about 10 seconds for Edge to start and show the landing page with all of the stupid garbage. At least they NO LONGER prevent us from changing the start page on our browsers, and you can turn off the start menu crap. The only thing I can figure is that they got a discount on the licensing for leaving this stuff enabled. Like the general public, I assume that most people inside the company just live it.

Home lacks the group policy editor that&#x27;s key to fixing so many Windows troubles. That&#x27;s the only UI difference I know of.

Recently switch to Windows, and my feeling is the &quot;Pro&quot; moniker in the OS title has as much weight as in &quot;iPhone Pro&quot;.Under the hood there&#x27;s price discrimination on the Hypervisor and other services that regular users wouldn&#x27;t use, but there seems fundamentally to be no difference in the interface between the two versions of the OS.I&#x27;d assume enterprise customers (the real &quot;pros&quot;) will have their IT department deal with removing all the crap and adjusting the group policy so the experience is somewhat productive. So Microsoft doesn&#x27;t have to care at all about &quot;productivity&quot;, and is free to bombard users with all the crapware of the worlds as long as there&#x27;s some remote way to disable it.

A win 11 pro license isn&#x27;t 200$.A non-OEM Windows pro license bought from a legit reseller is actually quite a bit more than $200, at least here in Europe.

Officially it is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;d&#x2F;windows-11-pro&#x2F;dg7gmgf0d8h4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;d&#x2F;windows-11-pro&#x2F;dg7gmgf0d8h...</a>

A win 11 pro license isn&#x27;t 200$.Also, I&#x27;ve never seen an ad in my win 11 installation, on win 10 it was trivial to remove them from start.

Microsoft has a funny way of selling us ‘productivity’ with Windows 11. On one side of the screen, they promise us a sleek and smooth user experience that will make our work easier and faster. On the other side, they bombard us with widgets full of celebrity gossip and sports trivia that have nothing to do with our lives. What’s the point of that? Are they trying to distract us from our work or from their work? Maybe if Windows 11 were free, we could forgive them for their sneaky attempts to get us hooked on Bing. But no, they want us to pay 200 dollars for this dubious privilege. How are we supposed to feel about that? Grateful? Impressed? Satisfied? I don’t think so.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hellzerg&#x2F;optimizer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hellzerg&#x2F;optimizer</a>

Note that this is the case elsewhere, we just learned to ignore or block that ad space.This article itself on my mobile has in its body:&gt; Sponsored Links &#x2F; The 5 Books To Read To Transform Your Life &#x2F; Blinkist Magazine

it may be possible for someone to hack this functionality into windows 11

That would be handy.  Designing your own front page to the internet was the height of web 2.0 AJAX &amp; RSS but the idea is still valid and haven&#x27;t seen a better replacement for what was easy back then despite Reddit&#x27;s catchphrase.

Would be cool if you could replace the news source with an rss feed

The whole &quot;just go elsewhere&quot; idea doesn&#x27;t really work in a total monopoly like Microsoft has on desktop OSes for some use cases.There is not, and has never been an alternative to windows for all use cases. Most notably: a gaming rig (One of few remaining use cases for stationary home PCs these days, so perhaps the most relevant for the idea of the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop). If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It&#x27;s just not.I actually don&#x27;t understand how Microsoft reasons around these things. There is zero way that these news links actually &quot;pay for themselves&quot; in income vs customer alienation. There must be something else to it.

&gt; Yes, it is. The job of a proprietary OS is whatever that company says it is.That&#x27;s just semantics. The job of an OS is to be an OS, not to be an advertisement delivery mechanism. At least primarily. Just like a car is primarily for driving, not sampling random smells, even if a carmaker makes a car that can do that.

We are the customers. Of COURSE its appropriate to give feedback on what parts of the product we like&#x2F;don&#x27;t like.The assertion that, because they put ads in, that it is the business-optimal thing to do is weird.

&gt;I don&#x27;t want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS. It simply isn&#x27;t it&#x27;s job.Yes, it is. The job of a proprietary OS is whatever that company says it is. If it&#x27;s shoveling annoying ads to users, that&#x27;s its job, and having annoying ads is a very sensible thing in a proprietary OS since the company is driven by profit, and they can make more profit by including lots of annoying ads. If you don&#x27;t like the product your vendor has sold you, then you should choose a different vendor. A Free OS that doesn&#x27;t come from a company with a profit motive won&#x27;t have this same problem.

I used to dualboot with Slack and some version of Windows, since the early 2000s, although I stopped somewhat when VMs became a thing anf then WSL. I genuinely liked Windows 7, but 10 was a start down a bad path and 11 is just too far gone.

I’ve wondered for a bit if there’s a future where Windows turns into A Linux distribution with some extra tools and runtimes for legacy executables. Microsoft has some really expensive software it has to maintain. Office is also maintained on multiple platforms, but it feels like Windows is starting to be a drag on the company - lots of resources for not a lot of income. As wild as it would be, offloading a lot of dev to the OSS community would free up resources to differentiate their product.

The only reason I don&#x27;t use Linux on my personal PC is that I use it for gaming.My homeserver runs linux and at work I use Linux, shrug.

It&#x27;s just more stable, at least this has been my experience. I&#x27;ve tried hard to become a full-time workstation Linux user for years, daily driving Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora for months at a time, but I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness, and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot have taken so many hours of troubleshooting that could&#x27;ve been spent doing something actually productive.Windows has many issues, but it never decided to break on me in the middle of the day. For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool, and Windows performs much better as one.

&gt; I don&#x27;t understand how people keep up with it.For gaming &#x2F; work. You wont have a better OS to work on as a .NET Developer considering Visual Studio is top tier, I guess VS on Mac comes second close, and Project Rider, but otherwise, Windows is the main platform.I otherwise use Linux on personal devices.

I&#x27;ve used a Linux desktop for decades and I&#x27;m sick of it. My Windows machine never bricks itself on updates. All my hardware works with it. Getting something as basic as Bluetooth or 3D rendering working doesn&#x27;t require a PhD. I don&#x27;t have to replace half the GUI apps when suddenly Microsoft decides to redesign its whole UI layer for philosophical engineering reasons.I can rebuild an engine, but I pay a mechanic to do it. I don&#x27;t buy cars as pet projects. I just want to drive the goddamn thing.I would pay the NSA money in addition to letting them spy on me if I could just have a working fucking computer.

Agreed.I&#x27;ve used Linux since I was afraid to touch BSD (in early-mid 1990s, i386 and TMS). I grew up on nix and found the whole shit-can of ~1992 horrible. Then Linux appeared. Of course I switched. Now I am back to BSD and Linux (Slackware).I have never had a prob (save for some audio with a CS* chip that was fixed by loading MS-NT &amp; copying their firmware from a hot running machine and dumping it back into some otherOS - Dell Lat 360 or 36x).

&gt;It&#x27;s been a long time since Microsoft made an operating system.Mostly true, it&#x27;s been a long time since Microsoft made a CONSUMER operating system.Windows Server isn&#x27;t plagued with this crap, it costs a whole lot more, but doesn&#x27;t have this nonsense. Also, isn&#x27;t designed to be a desktop, the recommend install model these days is to install without the desktop gui (you basically get a powershell prompt, and that&#x27;s it).

I&#x27;ve tried for decades to enjoy Linux desktop experience but simply couldn&#x27;t.As for these news you can disable them if you find them annoying.

&gt; I don&#x27;t understand how people keep up with itOne word: Adobe.Once the Adobe suite goes completely online, Windows will be considered a lot less essential in the office, at least on the client end.

You forget that it organizations are now able to install even more spyware made by Microsoft called o365 that is used to track worker productivity and a host of other tools such as netskope that make windows take 45 seconds plus to launch an approval dialog to escalate privileges.

&gt; I don&#x27;t want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS.Then, how is Microsoft supposed to properly track your interests and sell that information to their &quot;partners&quot;?It&#x27;s been a long time since Microsoft made an operating system. What they make today is basically a spyware-platform where you can run applications if you are really disciplined and persistent. I don&#x27;t understand how people keep up with it.I&#x27;ve used Linux on my desktops and laptops for decades now.

You&#x27;re welcome! It&#x27;s really cool and IMO has a leg up on alternatives like i3 because the whole thing, every aspect is entirely programmable.Enjoy :)

Just checked out awesomewm. It looks really interesting. Thank you !

This, I find even trying to ignore news sources doesn&#x27;t work. I continually try to prune the more tabloid papers like Daily Mail &#x2F; Express &#x2F; Sun but no avail.

Defaulting to nothing won&#x27;t happen, because too many users won&#x27;t know it&#x27;s a feature that exists and they can tune. That said, making it RSS driven and letting any user who cares replace it would be a good idea.

That&#x27;s _sorta_ what Apple News is, but you can&#x27;t add your own sources and it isn&#x27;t an RSS reader. It&#x27;s an app that can be deleted, and it only appears in the OS using the same APIs that other apps have access to (widgets). I also don&#x27;t think they push tabloid content by default, they push the biggest news outlets (probably the ones that pay Apple the most).I get that a company the size of Apple or Microsoft are going to want to have syndication deals. It should not be integrated so directly with the OS though, and should absolutely be removable (really, out of principle it shouldn&#x27;t be installed by default).

I wouldn&#x27;t mind a built-in RSS reader that I can use to display NPR, National Weather Service, or other sources. It should definitely start as a blank slate and allow the user to add sources. Build it into Edge browser. A button on the browser allows adding the source to the reader. Sites not containing feeds can invoke bing chat or some AI to wrangle the page to the feed.This can be done in a user respecting and useful way but that doesn&#x27;t make $

Yeah it&#x27;s ridiculous. The nerve to keep forcing something on a user after they have clearly rejected it. Honestly that kind of crap should be illegal IMO.After a lot of GPO settings and hacks I&#x27;ve tamed W10 to be acceptable, but it&#x27;s still crappy on principle.

I&#x27;ve already resolved that my next gaming PC will be a docked Steam Deck. I&#x27;m through with Windows.

I have always used Windows for my gaming PC, but last year when I got a new one I went for Linux. I was just tired of having to constantly reset my settings, remove ads&#x2F;candy crush from the start menu.

At this point I&#x27;m so used to using Feedbro with Firefox to get my news, getting it as part of the OS doesn&#x27;t even occur to me. I&#x27;m not too sure how useful that would be either since I&#x27;d likely just end up clicking on a link.I agree with you though if it exists it should optional and from credible (or from user selectable) sources.

It really ought to not exist, but if there has to be a news section, it needs to come with a few (like four or five) of the most respected news orgs in your locale, and be very easy to switch in or out.But otherwise, I agree with you. Windows should not be in the business of syndicating news. That should be the job of a third party widget (maybe provided by MSN!) that you install if you&#x27;re interested.

I&#x27;m an Ubuntu user at work and a Windows (desktop)&#x2F;Arch (server) user at home. Wikipedia says that Mint is based on Ubuntu, but it doesn&#x27;t really explain why I would use it over Ubuntu itself. What does Mint add?

I have installed mint recently, dual boot with windows.I mostly like it, but it does have one major downside.. the 4k font scaling is terrible compared to windows. When I adjust font scaling on windows it only modifies font size. When I do it in mint, it messes up a bunch of other things, and games start running at the wrong screen size etc.So I still ended up mostly using Windows almost entirely because of this issue.. (These search ads&#x2F;news can be disabled that this post is talking about, so not a problem for me).

Yeah, I really like Mint, and I wish everything worked, but there was just enough not working (for my particular configuration and use cases) that I went back to Windows 10.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.retorch.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;linux-mint.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.retorch.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;linux-mint.htm</a>

Come over to Mint, it has the feel of windows but it’s fully customisable and works out of the box.

You can shift it back to the left, I&#x27;d still probably stick to a 3rd party menu adapter though.

Me neither. Which is why I am using Open Shell (with DLL hack on Windows 11, without on Windows 10) [1]. Although since I prefer to have the option to have my menu bar on left, which is a reason I don&#x27;t want Windows 11...but its the popularity of Android and Google which put Microsoft to this direction. They get away with it, why not Microsoft? On my Nvidia Shield TV, I have to watch about 33% of my startup screen with commercials. Commercials which sometimes aren&#x27;t meant for my children. What have we come to that we accept this behavior from a TV? And Google gets away with this. (I&#x27;m not trying to downplay Microsoft&#x27;s behavior, however.)[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Open-Shell&#x2F;Open-Shell-Menu">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Open-Shell&#x2F;Open-Shell-Menu</a>

Are Fortune 500 companies installing current versions of Windows? How do they disable all this junk (and how do I do it myself)?

Want to say that MSN headlines have appeared in Windows for a long time. Vista had an RSS reader sidebar where the defaults were set to MSN.

Modern telemetry is completely unnecessary for that.In the Vista era, the OS was able to detect programs that crashed and give the user the choice to report it. It could even, with consent, check to see if there was already a known solution, which might involve an updated version or might involve changing compatibility settings.None of that needs the MS personal info vortex and none of that requires trampling on consent.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;social.technet.microsoft.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;cfs-filesystemfile.ashx&#x2F;__key&#x2F;communityserver-wikis-components-files&#x2F;00-00-00-00-05&#x2F;6685.1.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;social.technet.microsoft.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;cfs-filesystemfile...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.howtogeek.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2009&#x2F;09&#x2F;1pca.png?height=200p&amp;trim=2,2,2,2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.howtogeek.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2009&#x2F;09&#x2F;1pca.pn...</a><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;s3.jasonlitka.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2007&#x2F;05&#x2F;bluescreen_1.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;s3.jasonlitka.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2007&#x2F;05&#x2F;bluescre...</a>

I&#x27;d love for that to be the case if it actually translated to fixing problems. For instance, in all of Windows 10 I would frequently get an error if I used the media device system tray to eject a USB drive, as I had been taught ever since Windows 98. However, if I instead ejected by right-clicking the drive in Explorer it would work. Obviously Explorer was preventing the drive from unmounting and the systray eject should be changed to notify other apps and give them a chance to close their handles. It got to where I would intentionally do the &quot;wrong&quot; thing hoping that the telemetry would make its way to Microsoft and they could notice the problem.So I was thrilled when I saw a headline saying that removing media would be fixed in Windows 11. The article informed me that Microsoft&#x27;s solution was (pause for effect) to remove the system tray icon.Apply palm directly to face.I&#x27;ll admit that modern Windows is more stable than in the past. But how much of that is simply the benefit of memory safety in C#? Also stricter oversight of third-party drivers.

Telemetry in Windows has some value for users. Specifically, Windows has a system for systematically shimming the standard library (which is the documented API for OS services) to fix problems with applications.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcommunity.microsoft.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;ask-the-performance-team&#x2F;demystifying-shims-or-using-the-app-compat-toolkit-to-make-your&#x2F;ba-p&#x2F;374947" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcommunity.microsoft.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;ask-the-performance-t...</a>Telemetry returns information about applications crashes to the &quot;mothership&quot; and MS is pretty quick to update the application compatibility database to fix problems.

I just want MS to release a windows 7 clone with under-the-hood improvements from subsequent releases. All the consumer-facing changes since 7 have been utter crap - it’s hard to think of a single change that I like. I just want windows 7 with WSL.If not for games I would NEVER run modern windows at all. It is explicitly anti-user. It violates my consent all the time with their Edge shenanigans, and it pushes all the MS services like Cortana that I simply do not care about. At this point it’s hard to say that windows takes less fiddling than Linux to set up, if you include the time spent fighting the OS and time spent disabling Microsoft’s crap

&gt; For all the MS hate in the OSS community, I always thought Windows did a lot of stuff well (when it was good at least).This is my biggest complaint about Windows (which I no longer use), in that it had the chance to be, and once was, an opportunity to bridge the gap between MacOS and Linux. More open than the former, more opinionated than the latter.

Could you share your ISO or the process you used to make it? Was it easy or is there a bunch of esoteric stuff you have to fiddle with? I&#x27;m switching to 10 for my new PC build and I&#x27;m about to do a ton of research on decrapifying the OS

Microsoft seem to have dropped any pretense of being a software company, and Windows of being an &quot;OS&quot;. Windows is pretty much the same old same old but with more and more and more ads. It gets a big &quot;gee whiz&quot; when they change the backgrounds images and the shape of app windows! Their various apps are becoming more and more simplistic, apart from throwing ads into any conceivable screen. I find Windows and MS apps extraordinarily frustrating to use.

I don&#x27;t want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS. It simply isn&#x27;t it&#x27;s job. Maybe, as an option or optional add-on, but not the way MS does it.I use 10 now, as locked down and &#x27;fixed&#x27; as I was able to make it (custom ISO via NTLite with a bunch of crap removed and some fixes steamrolled in), but really I look forward to ditching it altogether - which is a shame. For all the MS hate in the OSS community, I always thought Windows did a lot of stuff well (when it was good at least).The telemetry, changing things for the sake of changing things and forced crap constantly being added is enough. I&#x27;m so in love with awesomewm at this point, and the fact that I can customize and program every part of my UI, allowing me to have something absolutely perfect and tailor made.

That sounds like an attack vector for malware, like the old windows desktop widgets they finally had to shutdown and turned off by default.

It&#x27;s not just the search windows, Windows 11 also introduced a new sidebar feature with customisable widgets but there was no way to turn off these crappy articles completely. From memory you could customise them somewhat by providing some preferred interests, but no way to turn them off. I no longer use Windows at home - that was the last straw and am now completely on Pop_OS.

I&#x27;m sorry this doesn&#x27;t work for you.  It has worked fine for me for years.

Change the setting for what happens when you close the laptop.You need to do the same on Windows and MacOS. I remember finding the latter very confusing the first time I tried to play a movie with a projector connected and the lid closed. It would sleep, unless I first connected an external keyboard.

I am trying to do this with HDMI connected but once I close the laptop the external screen is reduced to a 1 FPS laggy mess. I have a laptop with 2 GPUs (1 in the CPU and a discrete one) and tried everything...no luck

Works for me, with 2 external screens and a Thunderbolt docking station.

I’ve tried moving to Linux but the simple task of using my laptop closed with a second screen was impossible so I went back to Windows 10. I will give Linux a try next year again…or but a Macbook

You can tell it&#x27;s open source since it doesn&#x27;t sell itself very well - not a single screenshot anywhere!

Related and open source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;valinet&#x2F;ExplorerPatcher">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;valinet&#x2F;ExplorerPatcher</a>

The following program which someone recommended to me here in HN has been a godsend in this regard since it allows me to configure my taskbar the way it was in Windows 10: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startallback.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startallback.com&#x2F;</a>

Not for long I expect. Compact mobile reddit just got disabled last week.

Old reddit is still available. Just type old.reddit.com or change it in the settings.

I have the same problem, but to a much, much lesser extent, with Reddit.When I click in the search box, it converts into a drop-down list of news headlines.If I want news, I&#x27;ll click on news. Don&#x27;t force it on me : I avoid news normally, because I find it&#x27;s almost all unpleasant click-bait. I do not appreciate being forced to look at it, even for a few moments.

&gt; Can&#x27;t wait until KDE is accessible so I can switch to LinuxI&#x27;m curious (as a KDE user myself), why KDE and how do you know it&#x27;s the one you want given it&#x27;s not accessible? Why not any other desktop environment?By the way, your testimony to the KDE team could matter!

What features would you need out of KDE to make it accessible to you?

I guess this is one good thing about being blind and using a screen reader. It never has to focus on those ads, so I never see them. Of course, MS folks probably come here oh dear God they&#x27;re gonna turn them into notifications so I have to hear them now I&#x27;m sure. Can&#x27;t wait until KDE is accessible so I can switch to Linux.

Does Classic Start Menu solve this?  (It has its own search box)

Same here. I even have WMs wake up after a year of not using them just to watch them instantly break themselfs.It&#x27;s not fun, it&#x27;s 2022 and fixing OS level issues shouldn&#x27;t be what we spend our time on

Of course, because linux targeted at non-tech users allows greedy publishers to do the same things as microsoft.I used to think educating people was a solution, which it might be to some extent... truth is without regulations brought and enforced by people who understand the modern digital world and have the end users best interest in mind (lol), the cat will never go back to the box.

As proven by Android, and Netbooks before it, having OEMs shipping Linux distributions won&#x27;t change it.

Yes, I keep an old laptop around with Windows 10, which sometimes goes months without powering on. When I do boot it again, it potentially takes hours of non-deterministically finding and downloading and installing updates over multiple reboots.Compare to powering on a Linux machine and bringing it up-to-date in one shot with &quot;sudo dnf upgrade.&quot;

Seeing this makes me really sad for the countless people who are forced to use Windows, most of them because they simply do not know better.I have a Windows installation that I boot sometimes and pretty much every time I do something despicable happens, though I understand I am not the target audience.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.windowscentral.com&#x2F;software-apps&#x2F;windows-11&#x2F;how-to-disable-annoying-ads-on-windows-11" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.windowscentral.com&#x2F;software-apps&#x2F;windows-11&#x2F;how-...</a>

If you &#x27;re working , taking a break with trash news is all you need.In any case, i am sure you can remove those things because i have done so ages ago

What kind of thing? That it comes with a News app that has a pre installed widget that can be removed with a single right click?

Since mid-90s I allways had Linux and Windows. But when I updated a Testnotebook from Win7 to Win10 and saw CandyCrash and XBox all over the place, it was clear form me, I don&#x27;t have professional licenses to let me spam from Microsoft with such BS. Since then, I&#x27;m Linux only.

You have to remember that these issues do not apply to all users equally. Between different editions, regions, accounts, a&#x2F;b testing, usage patterns etc different folks can have very different experiences.

The problem is that Mac is equally anti-consumer, just differently (I haven&#x27;t tried it, because of the vendor lock). Linux on the other hand is great, but has abysmal quality check due to wide variety of everything. Windows is just works (until Win11, which was a marketing pushed bullshit, without half of the featured from the Win10 branch).

&gt; I can&#x27;t imagine having to deal with this kind of things on a daily-basis while trying to actually get stuff done.I switched from Windows to Arch Linux on Thinkpads for about 15 years and had a great time and learned a lot, but dealing with things on a daily basis was why I switched back to Windows 10 a few years ago, along with a new gaming habit during the pandemic. Gaming on Linux with Steam is wonderful these days, but the daily overhead of random stuff to deal with was too much when sometimes I just want to play games.

That&#x27;s precisely the question I keep asking: how much more anti-consumer features people need, in order to switch? At this point it&#x27;s hard to understand why there is so much resistance in leaving windows, I can&#x27;t imagine having to deal with this kind of things on a daily-basis while trying to actually get stuff done.

&gt; I sadly still need to use Excel in a VM sometimesAny reason for not using Google sheets or similar?

&gt; I sadly still need to use Excel in a VM sometimes, because the text import crashes in Wine.Wouldn&#x27;t Excel Online be enough to do the trick? It&#x27;s supposedly feature complete.

Games were the main reason I came back to Windows after trying Ubuntu with Wine over 15 years ago, then quickly switched to Mac, and when I was unhappy with Apples direction, Windows the unfortunate but obvious place to come back to. Should have gone to Linux instead.I still need to check whether all my favourite games are supported on Linux. Also, a lot of my games are from GOG rather than Steam. And I need to choose a good distribution. My laziness and indecisiveness is holding me back.But I really think the time is right for something better. An OS on a Linux-like foundation, with an Apple-style UI (but better, because plenty of stuff there still doesn&#x27;t make sense), capable of running all games. Probably developed and polished by a big hardware manufacturer trying to eat Apple&#x27;s lunch. There&#x27;s System76 of course, but they&#x27;re small. I want something that&#x27;s for everybody. A new standard to draw everybody away from the increasing piles of crap from Apple and Microsoft.

Thanks to Valve and the Steam Deck, all games that I care about now run on Linux.I sadly still need to use Excel in a VM sometimes, because the text import crashes in Wine. But apart from that, this year has finally been the year of the Linux Desktop for me. And 3 months later, I can say that it&#x27;s been a bliss :)PopOS feels exceptionally responsive. Looking back, it&#x27;s hard to justify why Windows was feeling so sluggish on a PCI5 NVME with 64GB RAM and high-end GPU...

I&#x27;ve unrecoverably bricked a couple of android phones through not having the precisely correct model variant for the instructions I was following, or for the specific ROM I was installing. Sucks, but I generally don&#x27;t faff with a device that&#x27;s worth more than throw-away.The risk is worth it for the life that LineageOS really breathes into an older device.

&gt; As to the Linux, I tried to use it every so often, but it takes forever to learn all the command line switches to accomplish even the simplest tasks.I rather spend time on getting some weird hardware to work (yes this is still occasionally a thing in Linux land), that getting my system &quot;reasonably spyware free&quot; (as we have no clue what actually happens since it&#x27;s closed source).

I&#x27;m not sure you can compare fresh installs of Windows to OEM installs of Android. A relative once got a low end Asus laptop that was so entirely bogged down with bundled crap it couldn&#x27;t get past the firstrun setup. I had to do a fresh install.Android OEMs do the same. Some are worse (looking at you, Samsung) and do horrible things to stock images in the interest of service integration and capturing long tail software sales. You could argue Google does the same over a AOSP-level base image with Google Search&#x2F;Play.Things like LineageOS give a clean android experience, but it&#x27;s hardware dependant.And call me old fashioned, but scrombling onto Google to find w10privacy, download it, unzip and run it as an admin kinda sounds like the hell the Windows XP era community got into with adware removers just installing more adware. You can buy the first spot on Google. Much rather see a Github page, source, releases, etc.

It took me 10 minutes to run w10privacy to remove all the telemetry and spyware from Windows. It took me hours fiddling with adb to partially remove some of evilness from my android phone. Dont know much about iOS, but I&#x27;ve heard they dont even have an adb equivalent.

Except that you pay for windows. It’s madness.

WSL is an &quot;embrace-extend-extinguish&quot; feature.[1] It isn&#x27;t good enough to be Linux, but it&#x27;s good enough to draw people to make the change that you did.An operating system should boot my computer and give me access to my hardware on my terms. Full stop.Any exfiltration of telemetry about my use of the OS without my uncoerced consent is a much worse quirk than any bug I have ever encountered in Linux.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...</a>

I completely switched to Linux the first time since 2006 because Windows is just way to slow or distracting now. Windows 10 worked okay for a while, but I don&#x27;t want the random crashes, tabloid news and slow file navigation of Windows 11. Fedora Workstation GUI sometimes crashes, but productivity wise it is so much better and everything works. Software wise I only miss the google drive client, which is still not here after almost 11 years[0]. There is rclone, but I sometimes get logged out.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abevoelker.github.io&#x2F;how-long-since-google-said-a-google-drive-linux-client-is-coming&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abevoelker.github.io&#x2F;how-long-since-google-said-a-go...</a>

I share the same sentiment.The other day I was frustrated with several Linux quirks my laptop was experiencing and decided to give Windows 11 + WSL2 a try.The sheer amount of bloat, sneaky privacy settings, ads, clunky UI etc. literally make Windows unusable. I was willing to put up with the switch (leveraging WSL2), but the entire operating system feels like a browser with toolbars from the 2000s.

If you consider OSs potential friends, you may like the movie &quot;Her&quot;.OSs are offers organizations, some may be friendlier than others. MS has shown not to care for your privacy the least bit. Apple at least tries to uphold the facade of respecting your privacy: so they probably will go to greater lengths.Linux (+ desktop packages) otoh are closest to what I consider a does-not-skrew-me-over OS-friend. Al east they do not have a public history of sneaky deals with 3-letter agencies and&#x2F;or a business model that involves me being the product.

It&#x27;s not about technology but the people who create the technology. There seems to be a complete breakdown of ethics and responsibility at Microsoft (and also other large tech companies) for the sake of &#x27;shareholder value&#x27; (or whatever the Golden Calf is they&#x27;re dancing around at the moment).

None of the operating systems are your friends. They are all very imperfect tools with different problems and tradeoffs. In many cases the devil you know can still be reasonable choice

&gt; I still use Windows for work, but that&#x27;s outside of my control.I quit my job to avoid using it and I would do it again.

I only boot Windows these days in order to flash things onto mobiles to get rid of Google :)I was later to the Linux Desktop party, and it was the default ads, bloat, and telemetry included in a base Windows install that was the final nail in its coffin.I still use Windows for work, but that&#x27;s outside of my control.Another vote for PopOS here as acknowledging nod to fxtentacle.

This part sucks. I would rather save my $100 and not give a dime of that money to Microsoft, but in this country I was not allowed to order a laptop without it despite wasting more than $100 in folks’ time trying to reach someone who would let my protest.

People don&#x27;t choose Windows, their company or OEM does.

It&#x27;s funny that even thinking for a sec, I don&#x27;t know if there are any things that I&#x27;d miss from Windows 10 if I hypothetically were to jump back to Windows 7.

linux desktop was far far ahead of even current windows back in the days of windows 7. for something called &quot;windows&quot;, it certainly had, and still continue to have pretty lousy window management

Windows 7 was genuinely good. It was stable, it just worked, it shipped with Powershell, and I could launch anything with very few keystrokes.The downsides I will acknowledge are the modal dialogues (which are worse on macos) and the fact that many system tasks require diving into the win32 api, although I&#x27;ve at least always found that to be well documented.At the time of 7, Linux desktop options were not greatWindows went downhill from 7. Although I still prefer it over macos.I have high hopes for Asahi, which I&#x27;m hoping will save my despicable work macbook

I live in France, but usually use an English UI. So when I updated my gaming PC, I just saw a &quot;search&quot; or something, figured &quot;wth?! start menu already does that&quot;, and kicked it off the taskbar.Then a few days later, a colleague shared his screen, with the French UI. The text was cut off mid-sentence. Something like &quot;type here to&quot;. The remainder would have actually fit if not for the random icon displayed at the right of the search field.

I use my PC infrequently, just for video games when I get time. It feels like every time I turn it one, maybe once a month, it&#x27;s done an update to somehow look worse and worse. One of the latest changes is the search bar in the menu bar now has scroll icons and is double height despite being empty. It&#x27;s like they don&#x27;t do visual QA.

Non-power users operate entirely in browser these days. You can switch them over to arch and they wouldn&#x27;t be able to tell the difference. The problem is switchover of the OS is a complicated, techie thing to do. Try convincing someone to switch to Win 10&#x2F;12&#x2F;whatever isn&#x27;t current one and requires more than ticking &quot;yes I agree to automagical update on next reboot&quot;. It&#x27;s not an aversion to Linux, it&#x27;s laziness.What we need is Linux laptops being sold in supermarkets. 99% of people won&#x27;t even notice they aren&#x27;t running Windows anymore.

As a power user, upgrading to Windows 11 is great if your hardware meets sysreqs.Why? Because of all the numerous and significant backend improvements, a relatively less schizophrenic UI, and more.Certain things that affect power users and common users alike, such as proper Intel 12th+ Gen CPU support and variable refresh rates, are Windows 11 exclusive, not being backported to Windows 10 (let alone 7).To be clear, I have my fair share of gripes with Windows 11 that I&#x27;ve worked around. But overall it&#x27;s an easy upgrade over Windows 10.

Every non-power user I&#x27;ve seen actively really likes 11. It&#x27;s baffling to me, I don&#x27;t see how it doesn&#x27;t get in the way more.

&gt; I&#x27;m almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.I had, in a sense, the opposite experience.I was discussing in a social circle of mine the reasons why one should avoid as much as possible the upgrade to Windows 11... and I completely failed to persuade anybody.Non-power users use a very limited subset of O&#x2F;S functionalities (I&#x27;d say that as long as device and applicative support is sufficient, the O&#x2F;S is essentially transparent to them), so, from their perspective, all those ideological and &quot;weakly concrete&quot; motivations are essentially pointless.I definitely bothers me ideologically because this is a large scale covert assault (and it will have long term effects), but sadly, to non-power users, it&#x27;s completely irrelevant.

&quot;Eulogise&quot; has connotations of praising someone or something after its death.If you mean &quot;trying to talk others round to it&quot;, you might mean &quot;evangelise&quot; :-)

Unfortunately, for PC gaming Windows still has sort of a monopoly, it&#x27;s not as bad as in the past thanks to Proton though.Also under the hood Windows is pretty good technology for the most part, letting this solid technology base being vandalized by anti-social middle management assholes is almost a criminal offense by whoever oversees this stuff (but I guess the fish rots from the head).

I&#x27;ve been using Arch Linux for the past 6 years and I have rarely had anything break. In between I had to use Ubuntu for 6 months due to some software that would only run on Ubuntu, which I found horrible. Arch Linux might be difficult to set up for someone new to Linux but once it&#x27;s installed I found it a breeze to use. There are distributions based on Arch that are easier to install, e.g. Manjaro.

For laptops you need to do a bit of research to make sure they have good Linux support. There are websites to help with this. You&#x27;ll also gain an intuition for which manufacturers to avoid.For the software side, you need to learn it, just like anything else. You&#x27;ve spent years, perhaps the majority of your life, learning Windows. Of course there are going to be things you&#x27;ll have to learn again. But you&#x27;ll be better for it. I&#x27;d rather learn to use a system that respects me than one that treats me like a commodity.

When someone complains about problems with Linux, I have a hard time to think of anything like that in my experience with Linux in the last 10 years. But when I put my experience in a wider context, I notice one important aspect:When buying new hardware, I make sure to check Linux compatibility before I buy something. In general, I prefer widespread and quality over new or cheap.That is probably (next to using a enduser-friendly distro like Ubuntu) the most important point to circumvent nasty bugs and digging deep into the OS.What is left are problems, that are mostly easily solved with a quick internet search and maybe copy pasting something in your command line.That will probably happen at some point, but not every two weeks. More like in the first month after setting up your system and then once a year or when you add new hardware to your stack.

The best recommendation is to buy hardware that&#x27;s well supported. Every piece of hardware on my ThinkPad X1C (including the fingerprint reader) worked with no extra config or messing around.

When it comes to laptops, I don&#x27;t see how apple is overpriced. I&#x27;m currently in search of a well-built CPU-performant laptop with a decent bettery, and the likes of XPS and Thinkpads cost about the same or more than a similarly decked Macbook m2 pro. Only the GPU and upgradeability could be considered limiting factors.

The most user friendly Linux distro I&#x27;ve come across that provides what you&#x27;re describing would be ZorinOS, it&#x27;s awesome.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zorin.com&#x2F;os&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zorin.com&#x2F;os&#x2F;</a>

The alternative is to buy Windows and spend 10 minutes turning all this off.

You&#x27;ve probably already got a monitor; if so, I&#x27;d recommend a Mac mini. Very powerful, slightly affordable, all the great Mac experience.

I said I wasn&#x27;t here to eulogise but most of the problems I&#x27;ve had with Linux have been temporary and I have gained transferable skills in fixing them. I have earned a fair chunk of money with those skills.It&#x27;s absolutely not perfect, and part of that is there&#x27;s too much choice, but if you&#x27;re willing and able, you can make it work for you and yours most of the time.And yes, I do think it&#x27;s much better than it was.

What&#x27;s the alternative though?I don&#x27;t want to buy the overpriced hardware that comes with Apple.For Linux, I&#x27;d like something that provides some kind of stability without me having to search for obscure shell commands for fixing new issues every 2 weeks, which unfortunately has been my experience with using it on my laptop in the past. Maybe it has gotten better, I&#x27;m open for recommendations.

&gt; I&#x27;m almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.So true! We are pushed around for the sake of pretetious crap.

We come from similar eras. I never made the transition to 7, permanently moving to ubuntu 5.10 thanks to the CDs they sent out in the mail. Ubuntu for over a decade until late 2020, then arch and arch-likes sinceJust a couple weeks ago I was backing up some scripts and adding some arcane linux lore to my obsidian database when it occurred to me that I haven&#x27;t re-installed my OS in 2.5 years. That felt pretty wild to think about, especially when I consider all the scripts, packages and late night pamac hammering I occasionally do when I find a curious piece of software. While I tinkere with my linux installs far more than windows, they seem to have held up over time far better. Whether this is a consequence of the software itself, my behavior changing, or whatever, I cannot say for sure. But it&#x27;s been a far more pleasurable experience using and maintaining my linux systems than windows installs.I think there is a distinct difference between people who compute for the sake of computing versus people who compute as the means to an end. One is a person who uses tools at least partially for the joy of tool usage itself, while the other a person who uses tools to complete tasks, the other . I cannot fault the latter for just using whatever works, if they are happy in doing so. But I think those of us who fit into the former category are far more likely to engage with linux and its brethren. My computer is a machine which, largely, I demand does what I instruct it to do. I prefer an OS that will do so and then get out of my way and I will accept idiosyncracies in exchange for this. So long as a laundry list of dependencies doesn&#x27;t explode overnight from a goofball update or my nvidia drivers don&#x27;t just disappear because they feel like it, linux meets those needs very well.

I got my first MacBook around the time Vista came out and thereby was able to skip Vista on my own machine. My employers continued to use XP for several years, and (after a long period of unemployment during the Great Recession) I couldn&#x27;t afford a Mac next time I needed a new machine. Now after a couple of years with a ho-hum Dell Latitude 13 that cost $1200, I&#x27;m using a MacBook Air M1 that cost less and performs far, far better and has none of the glitches and issues Windows and Intel are famous for.

Last Windoze I used was XP. Back then most geeks reinstalled the OS from scratch every few months or so. This was necessary to combat the inevitable rot that happened to every installation. There was always a number of things that were necessary to install to make the system usable every time. We worked out how to streamline some things by building custom installation discs. But there was still a load of effort and accumulated knowledge applied to just using the damn thing.I&#x27;d been playing with Linux for a while but hadn&#x27;t got beyond the dual-booting phase. Then at some point I realised that if I put as much effort into Linux to learn how things worked etc. it would probably be just as good in practice. Why did I continue to put up with Windows? Turns out I was right. I haven&#x27;t had Windoze in my house for well over a decade at this point. I never had to use Vista. One of the best choices I ever made.

This is the correct way to make people think.. Not: YOU NEED TO GO TO [OS.NAME], but asking them: &quot;why are you putting up with this?&quot;&quot;Have you looked at _any_ other alternative?&quot;

Windows innovation seems to have stalled, lacking notable improvements in productivity, accessibility, or utility in recent years.Despite its generally good quality (particularly regarding software and hardware compatibility, which is important for an OS), Microsoft&#x27;s potential to innovate and monetize Windows further appears limited.This plateau is common among operating systems, with hardware breakthroughs in the 90s and 00s sparking innovation in PCs and later in mobile devices. The same could be said about business computing OS innovations in the 80s and 90s. But now the OSes for all this hardware and purposes roughly meet customer and consumer requirements. So what more innovation could there be?In response to this stagnation, Microsoft has to resort to adware and spyware to profit from the Windows franchise to extract further financial growth from the platform. They could probably earn a stable income from Windows for many years by just maintaining the OS in an ethical way, but &quot;stable income&quot; is not what tech companies are looking for, they are looking for infinite growth.

I left Windows in a hail of Vista bugs, over a decade ago. I&#x27;ve seen it get worse and worse in that time, both in UX rot and anti-consumer &quot;features&quot;.I&#x27;m almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.Not here to eulogize over what I moved to, but I think it&#x27;s important people consider why they&#x27;re still using Windows. It&#x27;s not your friend.

Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news