Technology

Ok, guys. I'm reading some of these replies which are saying the amount of outrage is out of proportion. I have to disagree with that. I don't want an AI running on my PC that is monitoring and learning about my shit. I didn't want that data saved even locally, let alone the monetization of that data. I don't want to be paying for power of a device that is turning me into someone else's paycheck.

Can you turn it off? I believe you can. But I also believe that doing it manually would be incredibly annoying since that does go with a lot of past practice. I also get it would reactivate itself after major updates, like how Edge keeps reinstalling.

Are there other solutions to my Microsoft issues, yes. Chris Titus Tech comes to mind.

But overall, the Windows ecosystem does not feel right to me anymore. Could other people still use it, yes. Am I going to stop them, not intentionally. But my Arch gaming PC runs games better than the same machine running Windows. I've always entertained the idea of a full switch, still have a Windows 11 dual boot and haven't officially done it yet, but with this the moment feels right. At least for me, hopefully you can understand that.

I work in IT and far be it for me to tell you what OS to use on your own computer.

The only thing I want to die right now, is the AI bubble. Just pop already. Holy fuck what a worthless endeavor this has been.

I hate windows 11 so much. Notifications are so much harder to read compared to 10 due to the right menu being nonexistant, instead we have this floating notification area that I never use. Everything takes ages to load, even on my beefy pc Settings still takes like 10 seconds to open. And it feels like the programmers died halfway though re-coding the context menus. Everything slightly more advanced can only be done through the old stuff so you end up with this awful mess where there's no design consistency, and it takes twice the clicks to get to something.

Have Win 10 and was a Windows die hard since I was a kid.

Been running Linux on another drive as my default boot for a year and a half in anticipation of this horseshit and was only hesitant to delete Win because my Fanatec sim racing hardware wasn't supported on Linux.

Welp, turns out hid-fanatecff is a thing. Installed the kernel driver and boom, working Fanatec peripherals. Even my Moza shifter is plug-and-play.

Bye bye Microsoft.

These threads feel kinda redundant, all comments are just preaching to the choir.

Can anyone comment about anything besides "[...] switched to Linux [...]"?

Glad I ditched windows 11 for linux mint.

Microsoft is going to implode with the AI bubble

Windows is becoming so trash that a bunch of my not-that-tech-savvy friends have been hitting me up asking about gaming on various Linux distros. (Just a few years ago it was all “Linux? Haha nerd”.) And the non gamers are switching to Mac at a remarkable rate.

And things have progressed so well that even for the non-technical crew, after installing Mint and showing them how to use ProtonPlus to install and select Proton-GE, they’re pretty much off to the races without much further hand holding.

Four Horsemen of Apocalypse

1. The country where a lot of tech countries are headquartered in, elects a wanna-be dictator
2. Android restricts "sideloading" (aka: non-approved install)
3. Windows has mandatory AI
4. Mandatory ID Verification

How bad would running Windows 10 past support be exactly? Seems like most vulnerabilities should have been patched by now.

Microsoft literally wanted me to convert my desktop to e-waste as it lacks the magical TPM chip that Win11 demands.

I said "fuck that" and pulled the Boot SSD, kept the existing non-boot drives for data, and put in a brand new SSD, encrypted it and installed Pop OS in one shot.

Not only was it easy, I lost literally zero critical functionality vs. what I had with Win 10. There is a Linux app equivalent for everything I had before. I had a few driver issues but most were auto-discovered including obscure ancient printers and scanners on my network.

My experience with W11 on the work laptop.

Taskbar sucks, maybe because I'm colorblind but I can te what my selected program is and programs with notifications (Teams) look like the focused program. Apparently notification boxes there are pink now. Can't find any accessibility setting but fuck the colorblind I guess. It feels wrong to click the highlighted icon I for years have learned will mean that I minimize it...

And why all the dots? And why is the notification dot the largest, so I can even tell which window is actually focused?

Outlook doesn't open with focus, especially the window that is supposed to pop up and warn me of upcoming meetings. Really annoying.

Teams notifications just don't show if you are in a meeting and that is focused, they used to do that on W10.

Might be a Firefox bug, but there's a lot of new visual bugs. Github diff view is randomly strongly colored, and randomly changes to the old weaker background colors when scrolling/resizing the windows. And a surprising amount of scrollbars in grids that weren't there before.

I just wish W11 at least worked with the regular features of W10.

I upgraded to Windows 11 last week after my laptop initially came with it 2 years ago, but was so bloated and slow I installed Windows 10 from USB.

With the EoL I reluctantly upgraded due to company policy, and it was running surprisingly smooth. Really thought they'd fixed it. Only that two days later when I booted the system, I had a blue screen - the first one I have seen since Windows XP.

Page fault in non-page area 0x50 - google suggests reboots, or if they don't bring any progress, boot into safe mode and update all drivers. Only that I couldn't boot into safe mode, the BSOD locked me out.

Second suggestion was faulty RAM. Did a memtest from boot stick, no fault.

Third suggestion was to run checkdisk and scm or whatever it was called (some system file integrity check). All good.

Fourth suggestion was to boot into recovery mode, roll back into the system image the Windows 11 installer created, and redo the upgrade. Only to find out that the system restore point had not been created, despite the info box during the installation that this was happening.

Last suggestion was to reinstall Windows 11 from the repair mode, and select the "keep files" option. The offline installer crashed at 25% repeatedly, the online installer moved to 92% and stopped there. Repeatedly, again (tried 3x, and it takes about 1h to get there).

After all that frustration I had enough of that shit and installed Windows 10 IoT LTSC with updates until 2032. When the time comes I'll either have a new job where I can use Xubuntu, or Microsoft installed on a chip in my brain. Let's see.

Windows team is desperate to remain relevant.

I suspect most Microsoft revenue these days comes from Azure and the cloud version of Office. Windows OS is pretty much irrelevant other than as a platform to distribute other products.