I feel your pain, and am feeling very disconcerted on my own behalf too, having Win 10 and no plans of upgrading until network externalities positively force me to stop using it (at which point I'll probably give Linux on the Desktop another shot instead of upgrading to Win 11).
But I'm finding it hard to believe that there isn't some escape hatch there. I absolutely cannot imagine that MSFT's corporate customers would play ball with something like that, and they still represent a powerful interest group where MSFT's decision-making is concerned. So there's got to be some escape hatch. Is it a Home vs Pro thing?
I used Windows 11 Home recently in a VM, and found it absolutely atrocious to use. It was genuinely one of the most disgusting things I have used on a computer in a while. It felt like one of the few times I tried to use an Android phone, and everything was filled with bloat everywhere you looked.
This was a very stark comparison to my experience on my machine that I use Win 11 Pro on, which has none of the advertising fluff, TikTok isn’t pre-installed and pushed onto me when I open the start menu. It just has the things I want, that I added, and use frequently in the start menu. I didn’t use any of those uninstall scripts that tend to gouge into the OS, but it was upgraded from Win10, which had been installed ~3 months earlier.
I have 11 pro and I did the ethernet bypass to avoid linking it to a cloud account but it's been making threatening gestures recently about "finishing setup." Is there a new technique?
It's funny how you make a terrible assumption about an OS base while explaining the difference between the different versions of another OS.
Android is a great base, and some OEMs customise it to hell, and add their "bloat". Some is genuinely terrible, some is interesting. There's always Google and Motorola phones ( at the very least) which give stock experience, and popular FOSS versions you can flash yourself if you fancy them more.
Compared to the iOS experience, if you don't like it, you're holding it wrong ( does iOS finally support anything else besides all your apps are plastered on the home screen, with optional folders? As someone who grew up arguing with people who just put everything on their Desktop, i twitch thinking of that).
very complaint about it is firewalled behind log-ins and many platforms are probably working hard to suppress negative words concerning the upgrade now too... I appreciate your experience summary. Hopefully I can continue running v10 until public sentiment sorts the BS out like I did with Win7.
Privately I have a Windows powered, now hardware wise obsolete, desktop and two Lenovo laptops (a main one and an old as backup). The main one is running Windows and Ubuntu. The only reasons the laptop is still running Windows are a handful of, mostly older, Steam games and MS Teams for the kids. And I was too lazy to install Linux on the desktop.
If it wasn't for MS Teams, Windows would be gone for a while now. No way I "upgrade" to Win11. Luckily, both laptops run professional Windows liscences, the backup one with only local accounts. So I hope that protects me from much of MS pressure to upgrade.
Being used to local software, with local accounts and without "telemetry", I see the benefit of tue cloud. Less for storage, but Steam is actually a charm for example. Overall so, I think software took head dive when it came to user experience, privacy and performance. The fact that my OS will be serving ads now in the file explorer can only be part of one of Dante's rings of hell...
As a long-time linux user, the MS teams linux client is woefully poor. It has ruined meetings for me by repeatedly losing the microphone. I use Windows more often for Teams meeting, and I'm not saying the Windows client is perfect in this regard either.
Kind of, because especially for my younger one the app is easy to use. Up to the point she gave me some Teams lessons. For myself I would propably go for the web solution, I developed a true antipathy for MS and Google lately. I never was a Mac / Apple person, so Linux and some open source, de-googled versions of Android are the weapobs of choice.
Employer provided hard- and software is a different story all together.
I came to the conclusion that it's nice to have a google and MS free environment. If Teams is needed, or a Windows only game, I can still boot Windows.
I dunno if it's a Home or Pro issue, but if things get really bad, people will just begin to venture back to computer stores (Off Torrent Street) in the urban part of town and get a bootleg copy of winblows 2024 as they did in the past, then company sales will drop and they'll need to re-evaluate everything all over again.
If Linux were so much better, more of us would have switched already. The fact that reasonable people continue to use Windows despite bullshit like this is evidence that Linux really isn't so much better[0]. I can't help but think that some vocal portion of the community continually insisting that it is better and blaming its lack of adoption on laziness, or lack of technical understanding, is a significant factor in keeping it from being better than it is.
That said, yeah, at this point Windows is becoming so bad that even I, a vocal Linux Desktop critic, must admit that soon Linux will at least be the less shitty of the two.
[0] at least not for the people who are still using Windows. Obviously some amount of this comes down to how and why any given person uses a desktop computer at all.
KDE Neon with KDE Plasma is way better than Windows.
I don't know what else to tell you. I am a moron, lazy and get easily frustrated.
I don't work in IT.
Installation is 15 minutes and everything just works perfect. There is no way people can have all these problems with Linux here if I can figure this out. If it was any type of frustration I would just stick with Windows.
I think many people here must just make things up about all these linux problems because it makes no sense to me at all.
I don't even know what a single directory outside of my /home directory is for.
As someone who works in IT, I know first hand how much things break in Windows everyday. If Windows was as perfect as people on the internet claimed, I would be out of a very well paying job.
With Linux, anything that goes wrong is almost certainly of own design.
I always feel bad for the developers of the better GUI Linux tools. It's not fair for people to compare solid efforts to commercial software with solid funding and huge userbases for feedback. Some of them are their own worst enemy, but most really do seem to try.
No, [Ardour, LMMS, Darktable, ...] aren't going to do as replacements (for the nth time), but it's not at all their fault. I also don't fault them or Linux as a whole for the people who badger about it while ignoring the needs of the person they're pestering, but not everyone is able to make that distinction, and it comes to reflect poorly on the software.
As for ports of the stuff I do use, it seems the fault is in the lack of cohesion. It's not free to assign developers to port to even a reasonably narrow subset of toolkits and libraries to target the most users, and having a lawyer go over the licenses to see about packing it in costs money. And they're not likely to ever recover that cost in sales: the people who want it are already using the Windows or Mac version, and the people they might sell to are already productive and skilled with Linux options.
They have been for me. Darktable does not feel like a compromise. The ability to edit skin from RAW made the need for other editors pretty small. I go to Hugin to stitch panoramas but that's about it.
> The fact that reasonable people continue to use Windows despite bullshit like this is evidence that Linux really isn't so much better
If you want actual evidence, you'd need to control for some variables like windows being preinstalled and about the only ads it got was Microsoft advertising "why not Linux" in the past. Right now you need to spend some effort to even give it a go.
Linux is not "better" per-se, it's simply a different set of trade-offs.
For us techies, having to occasionally fall back to the terminal to fix a hiccup is worthwhile not having to deal with Microsoft's recent BS.
For a non-technical user however, Microsoft's BS means they can still accomplish their task, albeit slowly and without privacy, while Linux will leave them completely stranded if something breaks because they have no clue how to fix it.
It doesn't help that the Linux world spreads itself thin on reinventing the same square wheel 10 times (and arguing/fighting about which wheel is best - think systemd vs other inits, desktop environments, etc) completely ignoring (or denying) the fact that the wheel is square.
> while Linux will leave them completely stranded if something breaks because they have no clue how to fix it.
Is Windows really much different in this respect?
My partner is not at all interested in tech, and they use Fedora Silverblue (at my suggestion) because it's less intrusive than Windows and it's hard to break. It seems to behave weirdly less often than Windows did.
(The only thing that didn't just work was the printer, but we poked around in the printer settings a bit, and now it works.)
If Windows did just work, they wouldn't have been willing to switch to Silverblue.
Linux is a lot better for developers, mostly because lots of developers use it, in a feedback cycle, but the fact that most of the system is open-source also helps.
It's also good if you just need to do one or two things and they happen to work on Linux. Some people install it on their grandma's internet PC.
Even a majority of Steam games seem to work on Linux now, via Valve's fork of Wine.
Depends on he kind of developer. Web developer? Probably. Game developer? It's a joke.
> Even a majority of Steam games seem to work on Linux now, via Valve's fork of Wine.
That at least is true, it's getting a lot better. However, VR is still a hell of a lot more problematic on Linux even if you're using Valve's hardware.
Like I said, a lot of it comes down to how and why you use a desktop computer in the first place.
I think it's better at technical things for any kind of developer or technical person, generally. (Even at non-technical things in some cases: KDE, as a desktop environment, wipes the floor with Windows's desktop environment, from the taskbar to the file manager.)
But if one developer's "better" includes "playing <AAA game with anticheat>" or "using Photoshop" or "using VR", the betterness is sharply decreased.
I count myself extremely lucky my need/want matrix has happened to align such that I'm much more comfortable on Linux than on Windows, but that alignment is sadly RNG. :p
I agree with this. I've stuck with Windows so far, just because of battery life and touch screen support, and a single Visual Basic macro that I'd have to write a replacement for. But I have to admit, those are some pretty slim threads tying me down to Windows. Some computers in my household are already on Linux.
Teams for Ubuntu works well enough.
Most people would still have a hard time switching to Ubuntu, but then again most people (outside of HN audience) have no use for the file manager, or are using work computers that somebody else is maintaining. The people who a) need Windows, and b) need to use something other than the browser, are a tiny minority who are also tech savvy enough to figure out some way to deal with this.
Where I see it as a dark pattern is, someone is trying to figure out how to do something on their Windows computer, and the first thing they see is an ad that looks like a help message, inviting them to install something that they have to pay for and exposes them to even more ads. It's like Clippy but takes your money.
>Please don't bootleg Windows. Even a pirate install counts as an install. Linux is so much better.
Sorry, not for my needs, it's not.
My powershell-gutted w10 pro runs the software i need with remarkably little fuss. I keep trying Linux every few years, but nope, not yet.
So, dis-connected from the netm and piracy it will be.
Linux is not "so much better" as you can more or less do ANY thing on both without a problem. I use only cross-platform apps, so the OS choice is not a problem to me: firefox, thunderbird, powershell, vscode, copyq, dbeaver, audacity, pircard, doublecmd, less etc. all work the same everywhere.
After using all OSes, Linux is still lacking vendor support that Windows has, so one needs les time and lower level knowledge then on Linux to setup some things.
What we need is bloat free Windows, only kernel and package manager like Chocolatey/scoop/winget.
MS's corporate customers using Exchange365 are getting Office365 pop-up ads. Office 2019 gets Office365 pop-up ads. MS Teams users are getting MS teams upsell pop-up ads. When these advertisements get sent to 9k corporate users, it causes a bunch of trouble tickets.
You should definitely switch to Linux. It works very nicely, but frankly even if it did not it is less infuriating dealing with technical issues that will probably be fixed eventually than tolerating daily disrespect from some corporate overlord who feels entitled to dictate how you use your computer.
It's like quitting social media - mildly inconvenient, vastly better for your mental health.
You have to use the enterprise "long term service branch" (or channel as i think it is now) if you want a sane version of Windows 10.
Most of the annoyances are removed from there, and you can stick with an older version and not be forced to take the "feature" updates, 1809 works well.
The only issue i had is their new Terminal app is not supported, i forget why. Last i read they were working on support, maybe it works now.
A local KMS activator will license it, then you don't worry about adverts in Explorer, for a few years at least...
> The only issue i had is their new Terminal app is not supported, i forget why. Last i read they were working on support, maybe it works now.
It does! It's a bit trickier than just getting it from the MS Store, because that's not a thing in Windows 10 LTSC, but you can install some dependencies and get Terminal from GitHub[1]. I just set it up a couple days ago on an LTSC virtual machine, and it works just fine.
But it’s basically impossible to buy for small numbers of computers legally. And when it’s possible, it’s crazy expensive. (no, those licenses on eBay are not legal.)
Also the base Windows is not updated, so you end up with weird issues with games, that expect newer Windows; but sometimes also normal software. And Store is not there, which you might actually miss.
But I'm finding it hard to believe that there isn't some escape hatch there. I absolutely cannot imagine that MSFT's corporate customers would play ball with something like that, and they still represent a powerful interest group where MSFT's decision-making is concerned. So there's got to be some escape hatch. Is it a Home vs Pro thing?