Technology

Execs: what can we do?!

Jim from marketing: We could throw ads into windows 11... That'll get em flocking! People love ads!

That’s it, they need to roll out ads in BIOS

Sounds like what happened when Windows 8 came out. Oops I meant Windows Vista. My bad, I'm thinking of Windows Me. Sorry, I might have it confused with NT 3. Everyone loved Windows 2.0 right?

I recently moved my media PC to Linux Mint. I had Bluetooth issues with windows despite my hardware not that old and 'Windows 11 ready'. Zero problems on Linux. I play the same games thanks to Steam Proton library. I use Mac for work. So I finally did it. No more Windows. I tried to switch 5 years ago. But today Linux is polished. And mostly works as expected. You still need to open terminal a few times to change some settings. I'm happy. Highly recommended.

I switched my four home computers to Linux Mint this week. Windows is just more trouble than it's worth nowadays.

I work with Windows as a requirement of my job, I'm in IT and I'm constantly in and out of the bowels of the operating system. I have a lot of thoughts on this stuff.

My first thought is, stop moving everything around. Even in Windows 10, if you're using an older version, say 1804, and you switch to a newer version, say 22H2, stuff is moved all over the place. It makes it super hard to direct someone blindly to the control they need to click to get something done. You're making my job much harder than it needs to be. Stop it. There's no reason to move this crap around.

To bring out my grumpy old man routine: back in my day, if you wanted to do anything, you went to the control panel. Everything you needed was there. Now it's in settings, no wait, clicking on this settings option for that thing now launches an appx thing that, surprisingly (/s) is broken.

Too many damn times have I tried to open their damned settings app or the new defender security appx dialog simply crashes. The solution is almost always dkim online repair. Well, if it needs repair so damn much, how about you just repair it for me as part of system maintenance? The fuck.

Windows 11 is a special form of suffering. Right clicking on a file and.... What the fuck is this? I basically click on "more settings" every time I right click. And the changes to the settings application.... Don't get me started.

Also, why in the fuck do we have copilot installed by default now? You're an operating system, stay in your goddamned lane.

The only good thing I can say about Windows 11 is that it has really good security. So good that I frequently have trouble doing routine things. Today, I was trying to run a PowerShell script and it told me some bullshit error, which is pretty common for PowerShell. After googling the error, the recommendation was to change the execution policy. I went to do that at an administrative PowerShell prompt and it told me that I didn't have access to change it. While running as the administrator. Yay. Shit is broken again. Fuck me I guess. I'm off to unfuck my less than five month old new work system because Microsoft can't get their shit straight.

Customization options do not and cannot help me. 90% of the time I'm working on someone else's computer, so I have to fucking deal with the default behavior because I'm not going to change it for 500+ users whom I support. I'm pretty sure I'd get more than a few complaints. So I have to fucking deal with whatever hairbrained decision Microsoft made about what should be default.

Windows 10 had its own share of bullshit. One of my most common annoyances was the way the OS decided to install fucking candy crush, every fucking time a new user logged into the goddamned computer. It's like playing whack-a-mole, but not fun and filled with uninstalls. I hope Microsoft made some good money on that brand deal, because I sure paid for it with my frustration.

After all of this, I keep finding myself in the fucking registry, and thank God that's one thing that hasn't been fucked over by their new UI team. I keep having to fix dumb issues by injecting registry keys so I can not deal with the stupid UI all the goddamned time. It's hacky, and I'm happier for it.

I could keep going. Pretty much every decision they've made in the past 5 years has been some measure of bad. The only thing I've agreed with them doing is finally ending internet explorer. Begrudgingly, edge is better, but not by a lot, IMO.

The last thing I'll say is that the tpm bullshit is going to give me an aneurysm. Having a TPM at Windows install usually prompts the system to activate bitlocker. Bitlocker itself isn't bad, but it's fucking terrible when windows does this shit and doesn't really inform the user about it. Nobody knows that they need to back up their goddamned bitlocker recovery keys, so inevitably, when something goes wrong (we're talking about Windows here, something will go wrong) and the system stops booting, you need the fucking bitlocker recovery key to do anything. Your option, if you can call it that, if you can't get the recovery key, is to format all of your shit, and reinstall from scratch. I know several people who have lost a lot of work and irreplaceable files, like pictures, because bitlocker fucked them over and they had no idea it was even running.

Sorry about your loss, but all those family photos you saved that don't exist anywhere else are locked behind basically uncrackable encryption, get fucked, I guess.

I'm going to cut this rant off. Needless to say I'm pretty tired of Microsoft's bullshit. Make an operating system. That's what people want. That's it. We shouldn't need "debloat" scripts to fix your nonsense. Gah.

Windows 10 is pretty crappy but tolerable, everything I've seen about 11 suggests it's a utter shit show.

After trying Windows 11 for a while, I just gave up and installed Kubuntu on my computer. I still use a Windows VM for some things, but I make sure to firewall the shit out of it lol

One very important detail missing here is that Windows 10 is going to be end-of-support in 2025. You won't get security updates.

It is going to be shitshow.

I started dual booting to Arch Linux and more often than not I boot more now into Linux than Windows 11. I've used Windows since 3.11. Microsoft really have fucked Windows recently.

Inb4 microsoft is forced to bring back support for windows 10. Seems nobody believes in innovation anymore since all it means now is AI „helping” you with tasks you could do yourself or ads everywhere you look.

Same shit going on everywhere. I recently fixed my iphone 12 pro because upgrading by three generations literally would get me a usb-c port and an additional fucking button.

Microsloth doesnt care though. They will continue ramming 11 down your throats

Looks like Microsoft needs to further enhance the consumer experience by adding more personalized product recommendations, that'll fix it right up!

"Solution" is to break Windows 10

Whatever happened to windows 10 being the last windows? Like windows was moving to the os as a service model.

Okay, this seemed wrong. As the article said, even Win8 didn't go down in usage over time. So I went and checked the methodology for the source data.

Turns out, this number is based on social media and search engine referral data. Also turns out, they warn that while they do track Bing chat referrals when you follow through a link, they don't see chat responses where you only read the AI response but don't click through:

We have no way of measuring the number of queries performed in bing chat. However, we also don't measure the number of queries to regular search engines like bing or google either. Instead we track search engine referrals.

i.e. If you go to a search engine and do a search for anything and you click on a website result, we'll record that click as a search engine referral if that website had the statcounter code installed. It's the click to a website that we measure, not the actual search queries that were performed.

When you do a search using bing chat, and you click on one of the "learn more" websites we can track that as a search referral. So we are monitoring bing chat in the same way we measure the regular bing search engine.

From this data we can see from the statcounter network of webites, that the amount of traffic being sent to websites from bing chat is very, very small. Less than 1/100 of 1 percent.

So from our data we can say that bing chat is not currently translating into enough clicks to our network of websites to change the search share.

Of course you are less likely to click on a source website from bing chat than a regular search, as it is intended to give you the answer rather than have you go visiting websites to find the answer. So that needs to be factored in when using our stats for your analysis.

That is very interesting. That's a likely culprit for Win11 specifically to have gone down a couple of percentage points in the US and EU (the other territories seem to remain flat), but it's hard to prove.

It's also a bit concerning in terms of measuring the effects of AI search in both network traffic and in how search results are consumed. If that's the cause it does suggest that AI chat users are less likely to follow through to the source info, which seems risky, although it's also hard to prove what that does to receiving truthful info.

Lots of counterintutitive, hard to parse implications from this one data point, but I'd be surprised if it was as simple as "people have randomly decided to roll back to Win10 (and Win8, which also grows) for no reason".

How many % of these 70% can't upgrade to windows 11 due to hardware limitation?

So for all people that are on the fence about switching to Linux: Here's a sort of review and starter guide from a guy who switched to Mint about 4 weeks ago.

Are you someone who mostly plays non-competetive games (games without anticheat) and browse the web? You'll probably have a hassle free life on Linux. Steam's Proton layer does a lot of heavily lifting. Even if games are not officially supported. Turn the compatability on in the steam settings.

If you play VR or competetive games, it's a different story. VR is dependant on the headset. I unfortunately have all Oculus Headsets, which there is no good controller support for right now from the open source community. Anticheat simply doesnt work on Linux.

Design software From what I've read, the affinity suite now can be used through Wine (a program that lets you use windows apps on Linux) However, from my time with Wine, it is hit and miss. One update from either the application or Wine can break everything. So it is not reliable, unless you freeze all updates from both the application and Wine. Wine can be great (working out of the box) but also the biggest pain in the ass with hours of debugging. Stay away if you dislike troubleshooting.

Inkscape can be an alternative to Illustrator if you don't do heavy design work.

I haven't touched Gimp for about 6 years (used to be my main editor) but when I switched to photoshop it qas no competition. Don't know what the state of Gimp is now, will try it over the coming year.

music software Cubase or any of steinbergs plugins outright will not work on Linux (unfortunately my main DAW) However, I will probably switch to Bitwig (native Linux), which looks really promising. I got some VSTs working through Wine (all arturia stuff works great) but have had hours of troubleshooting without luck with others. Use Yabridge as a vstlink for windows VSTs. If you're a professional musician with thousands of dollars in plugins, I'd be hestitant to switch to Linux. You'll be dependant on Wine a lot, which is kind of a pain to rely on for professional use.

overall tips Might be a bit controversial, but if you're a novice: don't dump all the solutions you find online in your terminal. Actually, try to use the machine as much as possible like you normally would on Windows, unless you want to do Terminal stuff. If you dislike terminals, you'll only be frustrated by all the terminal advice people give you, which might even break stuff on your machine.

Try to download .deb packages from the official sources.++ Software center on Mint is great, but will moatly be outdated or flatpacks. Flatpacks can work, but I've had many issues with permissions and flatpacks (like an arduino flatpack that didn't give permission to use the USB port....)

Welp, I'm out of time, so I'll just randomly stop my reviewish/comment here

Win 11 has a bunch of new small frustrations without anything crazy good that makes me want to recommend it over 10. It's... Just really unclear what benefits I'm actually getting from 11.

The most annoying thing about Lemmy is all the Linux bros crawling out of their holes when the word "windows" is mentioned.

My work laptop recently updated to Windows 11 and man, what a pile of garbage. If I could downgrade, I definitely would

It seems that permanent obsolescence is beginning to cost too much for the users. I hope they will all keep dragging their feet, but will be a tough fight because friendly providers of professional tools will keep releasing the new versions only for Windows 11, eventually they will force some to upgrade.

My office is currently forcing us on to Win 11.

Feels bad man.

Windows 11 upgrade strategy was basically like

Microsoft: Hey gurl let's go out, I got a new whip!

You: ...okay, where we going?

Microsoft: uh, girlfriend. Nowhere. Look at you! Come on, we gotta get you looking ready to go out.

...oh no. Oh no, girl. This won't do it all. Call me when you get a nice outfit, k? Bye!

(Later)

Microsoft: 😢 why don't my friends answer my texts?

I've been using Windows since version 3.1. My rig isn't cutting edge but is still plenty good, so naturally it isn't supported for an upgrade to 11. The AI spyware in 11 is just another reason not to switch to it even if I could. Once 10 hits end of life, I'm putting Mint on it.

I honestly have zero problems with W11.

This being said I only run it on my gaming PC. My laptop runs Linux and I like that better. Honestly most people can switch their gaming rigs to Linux as well. I've tried it, it's very good. I've got some elgato products which I wanna keep alive, fuck with VR a little, and freetrack is not available yet which is the real deal-breaker for me.

I played most games on Linux no problem though and it was great.

So glad my job allows me to use Linux as my OS. I do IT, and everybody else in the company uses Windows.

Constant problems, brutal driver issues, OS crashes and lockups, software installation failures, hardware incompatibility problems, it's awful.

Linux at work, Linux at home, such an improved experience.

I'll still always love XP though, the last OS from Microsoft that felt like it had a soul.