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What I learned from 3 years of running Windows 11 on “unsupported” PCs
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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How is having to apply workarounds to keep windows working on old machines any different from troubleshooting the occasional linux issue? It's a rethorical question, the difference is that the workaround on Windows is mandatory while the Linux troubleshoot is nowadays rare and usually related to edge cases.
Some of the workarounds in this article are far more involved and convoluted than what I've ever had to do in 15 years of linux. Some are even dangerous for system stability and security. My very recent install of bazzite in a new laptop has been a perfectly out of the box it just works experience. Not even having to open the terminal. 100% friendly GUI without compromising flexibility, power and customizability. Today, suggesting linux with a solid desktop environment like KDE plasma is just foolproof. The end user will be using exactly the same knowledge and habits of Windows, without the harassment machine that is MS now. The change is not learning a new OS, is just switching a few assumptions on how some advanced things work.
Meanwhile I started on Bazzite, my display signal just stopped whenever there was load on the GPU, two days trying different things to make it work, switched to Mint, GPU works but wifi antenna doesn't, another couple hours to make it work... Windows? Install it and... Well, that's it, it just works.
Let's not pretend there isn't driver hell on Microsoft, sometimes its even worse than Linux.
Yup, on Linux, you have three possible outcomes:
Ideally, you end up with 1 or 2, because 3 gives you hope that you'll get it working properly eventually. I had this happen on my desktop, when I got a new motherboard, the WiFi chip gave really crappy performance because it was stuck on an old Wi-Fi standard or something. I got it to work at ~20mbit/s, but eventually gave up and bought a new Wi-Fi card for $20 or something and now I'm getting way better speed. And this was despite following my own advice to only buy Intel hardware, this chip is just notorious for having issues and is certainly an outlier (replacement chip is also Intel, but a more capable chip).
I had a lot of frustration on Windows w/ my wife's computer running AMD's audio driver and AMD GPUs, whereas both just work on Linux. After a couple hours, it mostly works as expected, but it's still a bit janky. So it absolutely goes both ways.
I’ve had weird Linux issues similar to that before. However, I’ve also had weird Windows issues too where it didn’t “just work”. I’ve had 2 experiences that really stick out to me with Windows
The first was Intel ARC, I absolutely love the card I have and was using it on a dual boot system. Linux ran it like a dream under Mesa, I just had to install a few more packages to get GPU compute for things like Blender. But Windows was an entirely different story. The driver worked great but Windows update was the absolute worst thing to ever come out of this. I’d have my driver all up-to-date and Windows update would come along, and completely downgrade my driver, to this one specific driver (I don’t remember the exact version) that didn't even support Intel ARC Control. It would do this randomly too, sometimes during a game, or during Blender renders which caused those things to crash and waste hours of time. It also had a 50% chance to just completely blue screen my system, which lead to a broken/incomplete driver install. It was a mess
The other was with a friend’s laptop I was helping repair. It was running Windows 11 and kept blue screening left and right for what seemed like RAM and driver issues. Tried switching out the RAM sticks, ran Memtest86, all tested good. Tried a new SSD and a fresh install of Windows 11, same issue even before any drivers were even installed. Tried the same thing but with Windows 10 and it worked flawlessly. The laptop had full support with Windows 11 and no workarounds was necessary but Windows 11 just didn’t work at all.
Not to say that Linux has been a smooth ride the entire time, far from it. But Windows has been pretty much the same from my experience in terms of weird bugs and crashes.
TL;DR: I’ve had my fair share with Windows shenanigans, been way too many times where it didn’t “just work” as much I would’ve liked. From GPU drivers to the entire OS.
On Mint, you troubleshoot the wifi antenna following a guide once and then you're done. On Bazzite you probably just needed to click to change to X11 instead of plain Plasma, on the login screen. I would bet money that you have an Nvidia GPU. Sometimes Nvidia breaks the drivers support on Wayland. They intentionally neglect it in order to keep your kind of mentality around.
On Windows, MS is going to eventually fix the workarounds so you can't update your computer anymore.
All AMD setup
Funny how people are downvoting when all I've done is specified that no, it can't be justified by the hardware I'm using.