I have 11, so not directly affected. But with “no more security updates” being the only real reason one needs to change, the obvious question here is if there is 3rd party software that can protect a Windows 10 system?
I remember when anti-virus software was in common use.
I’ve been daily-driving Linux Mint (LMDE 6) on my Thinkpad T14 G1 for almost a year now. At this point, that laptop is easily the most dependable machine I’ve ever had. My gaming PC is the last remaining Windows machine in my house. Recently I’ve been making sure everything is backed up (Syncthing is great for this) and finding alternatives for programs that don’t have a Linux version.
My plan is to create images of both my SSDs (500GB & 2TB, both NTFS 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️) onto a 4TB hard drive. Then start from scratch, migrating data from the images (Steam games, config files, personal documents I may have missed, etc) when/if I need it.
it’s a death by a thousand cuts situation, more friction to use a local account, less convenience in accessing rarely used settings (most recently I was trying to help someone change a setting located in the advanced power management control panel thing), more pressure to use edge, continuing to shove one-drive down our throats, copilot, implementing features that knowingly make third party tools work significanly less well without proper customization to fix it, weirdness around Multi-Display setups on laptops, the maps app getting worse at giving directions.
So… in my experience edge runs better than all other browsers with the ability to mute individual tabs without an addon. I disabled copilot. I disabled one drive and use local storage only. All settings can be accessed by just typing what you want in the search bar. If you need advanced settings for anything you just click the button that says “advanced settings” To me it’s fairly simple, but it’s all I’ve ever used. My Mac knowledge is minimal and my Linux knowledge is also minimal, so for me both those OS’s are difficult to use and navigate. I also like the ability to double click something to install it and not have to open a command box and do child coding just to use something.
So I get what your saying. If I had Linux only for the last 30 years I would also find windows to be confusing and stupid.
I had windows for 20 years. enough is enough. I’ll never accept all the bullshit of 11. but if you use edge, I see you have different values, like privacy is not really important to you
I’m not talking about credit card information. I’m talking about all the kinds of commercial data mining that is happening basically all over the internet. Personally, I’m sick of it. and while firefox has problems, anything chromium based won’t even try to project your privacy, to the contrary, especially edge. if you like having all your digital and a lot of irl activities collected in data broker databases for profiling, targeted ads, personalized costs and whatnot, then edge is the ideal browser for you.
I randomly decided to play a round of Tetris in Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 and ended up playing my best game ever of 715 lines with 54 minutes of play before losing. It was supposed to just be a quick 15 minute session but turned into something quite chaotic and fun!
Most problems people have with Linux, I think, come from trying to be Linux power users from the start by performing very advanced techniques beyond their time and patience: dual booting multiple operating systems (so they don’t have to buy Linux-dedicated hardware), using any graphics card (the latest and greatest GPUs are all closed source and developers who work on Linux do so because they despise closed source), using the least expensive hardware (which are typically closed source and buggy with anything except Windows), and emulating Windows apps so they don’t have to learn new workflows or abandon their favorite games (technically, Proton with Steam allows Windows games like FFXIV to be played, but it’s a neverending journey to get it working and keeping it working.
If you switch to Linux, accept that for a smooth experience you’ll have to pay more than you would for a Windows machine (e.g. System76, Framework) And if you want graphics card support for your emulated Windows games on Steam, you’re going to have to use the specific flavor of Linux the manufacturer supports.
That said, if you value free/libre open source software, then making the switch from Windows is totally worth it.
Can you elaborate on the incompatibility of the newest GPUs? It looks like Nvidia publishes a Linux driver for the Blackwell series and there are a number of AI applications (like supporting Triton and pysam-based methods) which seem harder to get working on Windows than on Linux.
I’m considering switching over but I hear mixed things about Nvidia support. Some people seem to say it’s a pain to get the drivers working and others seem to think that’s an issue that’s been resolved. Not sure what to think in terms of how difficult the switch would be.
I’m not sure about the specific AI apps you mention, but from my personal experience the “AMD works way better than Nvidia on Linux” mindset is no longer a thing.
When I upgraded to a new gpu a few years ago, I first got an AMD gpu because of that mindset that was all over the internet (I believed them), but for the life of me I couldn’t get games to run properly with it. A week later I traded it for an Nvidia card and it just works.
I do suffer from system wake from sleep issues that I think are the nvidia drivers fault, but atleast I can play games if I decide to.
Can I ask what distro you’re running? Some of the gaming-focused ones like Bazzite still seem to gather some comments about working better with AMD, though it seems like there are some workarounds. I am resolved to leave Microsoft behind completely at the W11 switch so I’m trying to get my bearings!
but from my personal experience the “AMD works way better than Nvidia on Linux” mindset is no longer a thing.
Oh my god it absolutely is, and until NVK becomes the standard everywhere it will most likely stay that way. That shit breaks so often on a laptop I gonna sell soon, on my families’ computers and apparently also in computers from people in my local hackerspace. Some distros just managed to work around those drivers’ problems really well, sometimes by including them from the start of creating their own well-working packages (like Arch’s nvidia-dkms).
I think this may be out of date now, dual booting is relatively simple to set up and there are a wealth of tutorials online for it, setting up a graphics card (nvidia) was a breeze, and for the wide majority of games in my library (I play both indie and AAA), I’ve had very few issues running native, and most that haven’t ran out of the box have guides posted on protondb.com, most are up and running in 5 mins.
Many Linux distros are not very user friendly and intuitive when it comes to normal users with two left hands when it comes to PCs. Lots of Linux power users need to get off of their high horse and realize this. If I had some issues, my parents definitely will.
You are right about trying to be power users. I switched to Linux recently and definitely struggled with my sudden reduction is understanding. I got everything I needed for gaming setup up in a few hours. Then I tried to set up some productivity workflows and slammed into a brick wall of my own ignorance. I definitely considered just going back to Windows.
It’s already really good to hear you got gaming set up so quickly. A lot of people struggle with that as well either because team green (Nvidia) is involved since their drivers are utter garbage, or due to trying Linux on an older machine that doesn’t support Vulkan (which is a necessity if you want Proton to just work).
The value of getting a perfectly supported machine from a Linux vendor like System76, Tuxedo, Slimbook, StarLabs, NovaCustom etc. can’t be understated. Even more so since you also buy their customer support with it. We must not forget that, even though Linux runs on basically anything, most consumer devices are first-and-foremost Windows machines.
I won’t be doing pretty much anything about it. I have 10 pro, I don’t really give a shit about what Microsoft thinks I should do. My computer is behind a firewall, and bluntly, it’ll be a while before the security issues become such a problem that I need to go and upgrade.
However. I already did the legwork. I went out and upgraded the hardware TPM 1.2 in my system to TPM 2.0, and I picked up some (relatively cheap) Windows 11 pro product keys. I can upgrade if I want.
I also have access to W10 LTSC, so I can always pivot to that if I need to.
I get the security and other concerns with Windows 10. I do, but the windows 11 changes, to me seem like they’re changes for the sake of things being changed. Windows 10’s user experience was already quite good, apart from the fact that every feature release seemed to have the settings moved to a different location (see above about making changes for the sake of making changes). IMO, as a professional sysadmin and IT support, the interface and UX changes have made Windows, as a product, worse; it is by far the worst part of the upgrade process and I don’t know why they thought any of it was a good idea. I also hate what M$ has done with printers, but I won’t get started on that right now.
For all the nitpicking I could do, Windows was, for all intents and purposes, exactly what it needed to be, between Windows 7 and 10. There hasn’t been any meaningful progress in the OS that’s mattered since x86-64 support was added. Windows 10 32 bit was extremely rare, I don’t think I ever saw it (where W7 was a mixed bag of 32/64 bit). Having almost everyone standardized on 64 bit, and Windows 10, gave a predictability that is needed in most businesses. The professional products should not follow the same trends as the home products. If they want to put AI shovelware and ads into the home products, fine. Revamp the vast majority of the control panel into the settings menu, sure. But leave the business products as-is. By far the most problems that people have with Windows 11 that I hear about, relate to how everything changes/looks different, and/or having problems navigating the “new look” or whatever the fuck.
Microsoft: you had a good thing with Windows 10, and you pissed it all away when you put out the crap that is Windows 11.
Stop moving shit around, making controls less useful, and stop making it look like the UX was designed by a 10 year old. Fuck off.
If it only was just moving things around. The control panel has been further castrated while the settings app is just bad. Something about their CPU scheduler changes straight up broke VMware, and obviously MS is in no hurry to fix it resp. cooperate with VMware, being a competitor.
Rounded corners? I couldn’t care less. It’s a functional downgrade, though.
Install size has gone up, its sluggish on my surface pro 7, its constantly wanting to grab my attention to put towards their other products, windows 10 was bad as it seemed to be ms’s first iteration of their now billboard, but at least I could offline install, make a local account and mostly be left alone. And windows 11 is aweful for its kiddy gloves.
While I get why they want to do all online accounts, no. Just no.
Ironically, for business users, online accounts are basically the way the industry is moving. Some integration with Azure active directory (now known as “Entra ID” - a useless rebranding of the exact same product), you can connect systems using someone’s email, and it can tightly integrate with your work email account on Microsoft 365, and everything just kind of fits together.
This prevents admins from having to go and do prep/setup on each system and/or maintain a library of system images with all the standard settings for the organization, since connecting with AAD/Entra can also enroll the device into Intune and those policies are just as powerful, if not more powerful than what you can do with images and prep; just now is entirely automatic.
For home users, it’s less about the convenience of system management and more data harvesting of their clients. The irony is that a lot of the business versions still have an option to bypass the online account (usually by selecting an option that you will be joining a classic domain).
So business has the option and largely, business is moving away from it, and home users don’t, but that’s something that a large number of home users want.
The only thought I have on it is that: bitlocker is enabled by default on many newer versions of Windows, by signing in with your M$ account to the PC, those bitlocker keys are backed up. If you don’t use an online account, it’s up to you to back then up, and users either don’t do that, or do it in such a way that it’s ineffective, like saving the recovery key to the very drive that needs that key to unlock it in the event of a problem.
I’ve seen more than one person fall victim to their own lack of knowledge and understanding when bitlocker is enabled, and Windows update screws their boot sequence to the point where they need to do a recovery, which requires the recovery key, which they do not have. It basically makes all of their data inaccessible, and gigabytes of data, just from the people I’ve known affected by this, has already been lost as a result.
I hear what you’re saying, but, there have been some pretty significant improvements to Windows, generation after generation.
Windows 10 finally seemed like they were on the right (and hopefully final) track with the direction of the operating system. Probably the last big improvement was to bring basically everyone to 64 bit.
XP moved us from the 9x kernel to the NT kernel that’s used in Windows today. Vista introduced security features and driver updates that help to keep systems free from many common root kits. 7 brought in a very standard UI, that would be the basis for things going forward, 8/8.1 existed… Then 10 basically uplifted everyone to 64 bit as a default.
Of course this is far from a complete list.
What did W11 add that we didn’t have before? A TPM requirement? Ads? AI slop/shovelware/spyware?
You’re not wrong, and I agree in that it feels like W10 is where MS finally got it right.
However, hindsight is 20/20, and those sentiments were definitely not felt in the first few years after W10 was released. Once all the big issues were worked out and people figured out how to remove the bloat/spyware shit though, it was a solid OS. I still run it on my gaming PC (for now - tested some crucial programs last night on my laptop running LMDE6, great success)
What did W11 add that we didn’t have before? A TPM requirement? Ads? AI slop/shovelware/spyware?
W11 right now is essentially a shitty skin on top of W10, with all that extra shit. The kernel is still version 10.x.whatever FFS 😅. But SHINY INTERFACE and ONEDRIVE
Yea just set up a windows 11 pc for the first time and the experience was basically:
It forces you into making a Microsoft account or log in with one, then it told me mine was locked even though I was able to log in fine elsewhere. I had to use the alternate log in method to get in (I know you can make a local account but I already had one set up for this).
Then it tries to force you to “back up from your old pc” which this was an entirely different system so I’m not even sure why I would want that.
Then it tries to convince you to send them a bunch of telemetry while reminding you that you’ll still get ads if you don’t, they just won’t be targeted towards you.
Then it tries to push microsoft office on you.
Then it needs to do updates which took like 45 minutes.
Then you’re finally at the desktop where you get probably half a dozen othe pop ups between windows and the vendor.
Then it’s “usable”
By comparison Bazzite took like 20 minutes to get to a usable desktop and isn’t nagging me about ads at all. I have a laundry list of things still to figure out but so far way less annoying.
There is a workaround for installing win 11 with local account, it’s still horseshit
the fact that they think that just because they still show ads it’s ok in any way shape or form to collect any personal information is insane
don’t forget they are also trying to screen record 24/7 and then store it in the cloud (yes they store it “locally” in you appdata, that they then decided to sync with OneDrive)
Yea, I had a throwaway account already to use for the login so I didn’t bother trying it. They still managed to make it annoying even when I did it their way and agreed it is horseshit.
Agreed.
I DID forget about that. Thanks for reminding me I need to figure out how to opt out (assuming it’s even possible).
Skies of Arcadia!! So much of the Dreamcast library is on Steam it’s crazy to me they skipped out on this one. Yes I know I can just emulate it but I’d love to see it on Steam haha
Tales of Xillia 1 and 2 as well, as far as I know they’ve yet to be released from the PS3 prison. I do have some semblance of hope for these ones though seeing as Bandai Namco are pretty good about remasters/rereleases
yep, definitely ark with a pokemon paint job more than any game pokemon has put out. that paint job has still gotten a lot more people to play the game than a lot of other survival games.
Right now if i ever have a craving for Ark i think i’ll probably go back to this. Ark is fun in small doses, but the huge size makes it impossible to download on a whim. This i can have done in a few hours
yeah i put ~80 hours into before they started pumping out paid dlc for their early access game and haven’t touched it since. and any remote desire to maybe get more out of money spent was immediately soured by that size.
Definitely, I’ll be glad to check it out. I downloaded the demo, could you tell me if there’s any recommended settings and controller profiles for steam deck?
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