Just bought a new Windows laptop and it was LOADED with bloatware. Some apps could be deleted simply, some however are baked in. Discovered BloatyNosyApp and the partner app Junk Ctrl for W11 on GitHub https://github.com/builtbybel/BloatyNosy
This seems to have done the trick quickly and surprisingly easily compared to DIY powershell activity.
All PCs bought in retail should be wiped and reimaged with a fresh install. At the very best, you install the firmware updates manually or via the manufacturer app but even then I will take a second look before approving.
But that only removes OEM bloatware and you still have to deal with Windows bloatware.
Bloatynosy removes onedrive, people, microsoft mixed realityportal and such. With just 1 click. I literally just used it now on a fresh windows installation
It also disables telemitry, and a few other things (default “fix” button)
That’s…fantastic.
That was the point of the article, it doesn’t do the trick anymore, bloatware is now part of the default install.
Most OEMs push firmware updates via windows update these days.
The OEMs app might get you them sooner, but nothing is better than windows BSODing, then deciding now’s a good time to install a firmware update.
HP Bios updates were delivered earlier then the actual program by HP itself.
It has been like that for a long time
Yes, let’s fucking download software from a GitHub repo!
And then bitch how Linux isn’t user friendly, because you… might have to download software from a GitHub repo?
One is a choice, the other an inevitability. These are not the same.
Dafuq are you talking about? I’ve downloaded many random shit from Github on Windows to restore some basic UX functionality on W11, while I have never downloaded any software from Github repo on Linux, because everything I need is either on Ubuntu repo or some ppa or - shockingly - is built-in DE. And I’m a programmer and Linux is my daily driver.
Cool, you chose to use github to return optional functionality. That’s a little different from being required to use github so that your latest software purchase can run on your system. It’s not difficult, you’d think a programmer would have a better grasp on simple logic problems.
being required to use github so that your latest software purchase can run on your system
I don’t know what this is referring to.
Maybe proton-ge but again that’s entirely optional. They’re just grasping at straws trying to defend their abusive OS.
What the fuck are you talking about? No one downloads software from GitHub on Linux unless they’re doing some really fringe, custom shit. Linux users detest randomly downloaded software from the internet (which is effectively the ONLY way of getting software on Windows, btw). We want all software to be managed by our package managers.
Also, lol on “software purchase”. What software are you buying on Linux?
The AUR is always your friend. (No, I don’t use Arch, I use ArcoLinux)
The MBA dickheads took Microsoft over years ago. Engineers used to have some input on features and design, but those days are long gone. I know the term enshittification has been overused, but it applies double to Microsoft.
Tools like ShutUp10 (which works on Windows 11) are the only reason I can bear to use their bloated horrible OS for my job.
Office 365 pissed me off so much I only use LibreOffice now (and it’s excellent).
We should all be using Linux, but some folks (like me) are trapped for now.
Fuck Libre Office and Open Office.
I really hate the, “we should all use Linux” mentality and I see it on here a lot. Let me tell someone who barely knows how to send a fucking file over the internet how to fix their broken repository that decided to randomly break during an Linux upgrade.
Linux and Windows do different things in different ways that make sense in both ways for different reasons. Not everyone should hate Windows or vice versa, Linux, because this entire Lemmy community thinks it is superior in every way.
I get pissed off by office as well but you know what it has some pretty damn good features. It works in the cloud it’s easy to sync across my decides.
Windows updates break things but at least MS and Windows has a massive catalogue of fixes and ways to go back.
I love Linux but holy mother of fucking God it is an absolute pain in the ass to fix when it breaks and you expect me to tell my Mom to understand that.
No, we should not all be using Linux because Linux does not work for all models needing to be met. I hate to be that aggressive asshole but Jesus Christ I keep seeing this on Lemmy and it’s just a god damn stupid fucking statement. Oh and for fucks sake. If I see, “what kind of Linux system are you using that breaks.” Dammit, I have literally seen Linux break in the middle of a college classroom demonstration of just installing it and wouldn’t you know it just like Windows it isn’t perfect. Get off your high horse people. You don’t know something more than the average person because you use Linux or Windows or hell even Unix.
People who “barely knows how to send a fucking file over the internet” can’t fix shit on Windows either. I spent a lot more time fixing my mom’s Windows install than her Ubuntu.
I spent a lot more time fixing my mom’s Windows install than her Ubuntu.
Small anecdote, roughly in the same line as yours:
As W7 was close to end of life, I asked my mum about it, as her laptop used W7. And after highlighting the privacy nightmare that W10 became, she decided to try Linux out. So I installed Mint in her machine. At the start she asked for help often, but the amount of “pls help” decreased over time. The last time that she asked for help was because she wanted to access “her computer” from her phone, just like I do with mine. (i.e. local network.)
My neighbours though? I often get some spare change from them, by helping them out with their Windows machines. And they’re in the same level of tech expertise as my mum, you know, those folks who can download and install a program and not much else.
Linux Mint really impressed me when I decided to try it in a VM earlier this year (was already using fedora in VMs for build environments on a Windows company machine). It installs quickly, runs smoothly, and the updates have been painless.
I like having a terminal open constantly, and learning about technical workings and power user features I may not have known about. However, for non-techie "email and web browsing” use, I would put it in front of my parents no problem. Right out of the box it even looks a bit like windows (cinnamon version, didn’t try others). It even has an “app store” like experience with the software package manager.
If a power user has trouble because they’re used to configuring windows, they can probably learn how to do those settings on a user-friendly Linux distro.
That does not mean it would work for everybody, and that does not mean it won’t break in frustrating ways. It was programmed by humans, after all.
I’m not gonna comment on the Linux portion because you seem quite passionate, but both Libre Office and Open Office are cross platform apps. So they’ll work just fine with your OneDrive / Dropbox / Backblaze / whatever to give you the wonderful fully cloud synced experience on either Windows or Linux.
Linux is just the kernel and infinitely superior to anything Microsoft has ever produced by itself. Stability and usability issues arise from the distribution that is being used, there are many that are tailored for the average consumer and that are just as simple to use as Windows. People like to forget it, but Android also uses the Linux kernel and is the most successful operating system in the world, with the amount of installed instances dwarfing the amount of Microsoft Windows installations.
Chrome/Linux is very easy to use too. Easier than Windows.
Windows randomly decided to break for me many more times than Ubuntu did for my parents. Every time a sudden new update is pushed on the background, stalling anything I would be doing to a halt, it’s a roll of the dice if it will still function properly when it’s done.
Sure, and how easy was it to fix those issues?
Usually it is nothing more than either reversing an update or waiting for the next update in Windows.
While in Linux you’d have to re-import the correct repositories through command line and it might still not work, explain that to your parents.
How easy? Not at all. I’ve had to format the whole computer several times that reversing updates failed. At which point using Linux wouldn’t have been any harder.
Poke about in registry, Google problems where the solutions are for the wrong version of windows, wade through driver problems, find that the issue is in a toggle that used to be easy to find in control panel but now is buried under layers of crap
Usually it is nothing more than either reversing an update or waiting for the next update in Windows.
…Waiting with a non-functional computer until the next update?.. Really?..
While in Linux you’d have to re-import the correct repositories through command line and it might still not work, explain that to your parents.
Why would a non-technical person ever need to use 3rd-party repos? Besides that, “reimporting” a repo is just adding 3-5 lines of text to a file, which can be done via gEdit, or, in most cases, through the settings in a distro’s package manager UI.
Your mom would do just fine on Mint, and you know it.
Yeah … No. Ubuntu is way more stable for me than win10. And much lazier to use. This argument was true ten years ago but Ubuntu and friends are really just install and click browser just like most people use Chromebooks
I mean…if you’re installing Linux and having a “normie” use it, if they’re just using the GNOME Software Center or the dkstro’s equivalent…they’ll literally never have an issue.
Yep… Moving to Lemmy it’s quite surprising how much of an echo chamber the Linux group has on here.
It’s a good OS, but being honest Windows is likely better for almost everyone as it’s a lot simpler to understand with good support. Don’t have to worry about comparability as much or other things either.
It’s such an echo chamber that you’ve gotten a number of downvotes just for providing your perspective here
Honestly, I’ve noticed that really only select communities really ever moved from reddit to Lemmy and it’s full of people who are sucking their own dick on superiority complex.
A lot of this stuff (Linux requiring command line and root knowledge and Lemmy needing multiple instances to shuffle through) is just absolutely going to keep people, that I struggle to explain a URL to, from using any of this stuff.
I get that they like the privacy and the control and all that of this but telling people to just get good and use this stuff is like a basketball star being confused when you say you struggle to get a point because you should just run up and dunk it. Missing some steps and skills.
Oh, fuck off with that. I’ve used Windows since the beginning, and the number of times the solution to a problem is “reinstall the whole marianne” is astounding. I’ve installed Windows thousands upon thousands of times, just because that was the fastest way to get someone working again than to try to sort that mess of an OS out, with absolutely no real support from the supplier of the OS than a few MVP articles that are utter stabs in the dark 90% of the time.
Your user that can’t send a file or fix Linux isn’t fixing Windows either, or even reinstalling it. And I’ll put an install of Ubuntu for a tech-illiterate person that does 99% of what every tech-illiterate user does on a system up against any Windows install. You know for a fact that install will be brought to its knees in a couple years and need to be blown out, and the Linux user will be merrily using some ancient Linux version a decade later, and it won’t run like dogshit.
Open office and libre office are bad because you don’t like linux?
What broken repository yiu talking about? My mum used Linux for over 10 years and she never saw Windows in her life. Email, YouTube, eBay… Never a problem. I can’t even imagine leaving her with Windows.
Who hurt you, Arch Linux?
if I didn’t work in IT and I didn’t play certain video games and I didn’t need certain recording software I would be 100% Linux it kind of pisses me off that I can’t be 100%.
That was a whole lot of “If I didn’t just” statements xD
Still, VMs and containers and such. Could still do it if you wanted.
Proton is revolutionary but it still isn’t a solution for every game. And that’s not even getting into the lack of support Nvidia gives to anything Linux.
I mean I’ve yet to come across a game that is unsupported on my Steam Deck. For all intents and purposes, gaming on Linux is the real deal.
The main issue comes when the game is using proprietary stuff. Like I found getting Kingdom Hearts to run at all was a pain in the arse because of it using a proprietary codec for it’s cutscenes.
I also found Hand of Fate 2 had some weird rendering issues with certain graphics settings.
And if you want to do Ray tracing or HDR you’re currently out of luck.
Me too, friend. Me too. Very similar situation.
ShutUp10 and WinAeroTweaker are the GOATS.
winaero was a game changer, what is ShutUp10?
I just recently updated shutup10 because of another annoyance of windows and was surprised that it didn’t solve my problem right away. Even with shutup10 it’s barely bearable.
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Same experience as I. For now W11 has been smooth sailing. Sure I like using my Linux notebook more for coding and such, but W11 is not the devil people describe IMO
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But then I’d have to support Macintosh’s overpriced garbage.
Get what you pay for. My M2 MacBook pro is best computer I’ve ever used by a huge margin
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Right. Buy products that is not only expensive to buy, but also expensive to repair. Pass…
And you are forced to give up system control, and choice of software
You will even have to give up compatible software because Apple deemed it “too old”
The close competition? For the price of a MacBook you could get a beefy ass PC.
A MacBook is very good at what it does. If you tried to spec out a laptop/portable computer for similar tasks, the Mac would be pretty competitive and have longer battery life.
Once you try to do anything that apple didn’t intend for it to do (play games, for example) or if we turn to desktops then the value proposition goes away pretty quickly
So my all-purpose PC is now limited by the intentions of the silicone manufacturer, and therefore it’s better than the other options?
Your computer always has been limited by the intentions of the system designer. It’s not malice, it’s market-fit and optimization.
Look at those x3d variants that amd has been putting out. Fantastic for gamers, but relatively niche for general computing tasks. If I were an OEM, would I pick those parts for my workstation prebuilts? Fuck no, they’re overpriced for someone using office and a web browser. But for my gaming line, maybe, if I could get a deal.
All computers have many of these price/performance/size/power draw/availability decisions to make, and portables even more so. Apple knows that most of their users need xyz, and they build for that. Everyone else’s needs go into the pile of lower priority, some of which will be supported if they feel like it.
If all you need is office and a web browser there’s plenty of suitable ARM systems. Handful of A72 cores, generally come with more than enough of a GPU to drive 2d, important: At least a couple of PCIe lanes for an SSD. I’m sure by now there’s more suitable systems but an RK3399 is sufficient, originally a chipset for set-top boxes (hence why it has a beast of a VPU (for its price and age) which can decode 4k h265). Bought the board for about 100 bucks back in the days, what, three or four years ago. Actually I should hook it up to a monitor and check out those fancy new GPU drivers that have been coming along, the thing is vulkan-capable (back in the days I was stuck with a gles blob, and using the VPU meant using an overlay).
That’s not apples to apples. If you spec a windows laptop, good luck getting the same performance and the same battery life and portability at the same price. Also build quality, screen, speaker and trackpad quality will likely not be at apples level from the windows machine. If that’s what you’re in the market for Apple machines are not bad. For instance a photographer/videographer working on location, truly amazing for them. Should everyone buy one? No. Are there a 100 better ways to spend the money if you don’t have that specific Apple favoured use case. Sure, e.g. your mum doesn’t need a MacBook Pro for Facebook / Amazon browsing and your cousin shouldn’t buy a Mac Studio for gaming. But use cases do exist, and for those people Macs are genuinely a good proposition.
I’m willing to bet you could find a laptop with a really nice track pad, screen and camera if you really wanted to for half the price. Everything “quality” about Mac is double the price just for having an apple logo on it.
Go on then…
Awe, getting sad I’m talking bad about your apple cult lol
The issue I have with non-Apple laptops is that comparable performance requires an active cooling system that is often distractingly loud. I am willing and able to pay extra for a platform that lets me focus, and lets me watch some Netflix without having to crank the volume to drown out the fans. Then the all-metal exterior is also quite durable, the trackpad and speakers are top-notch, the Pro comes with that XDR screen, and the battery life is hard to beat. Plus I can take it to a nearby Apple store if I’m having a problem with it, instead of having to mail it to a regional support shop and wait potentially for weeks without the device. It’s more than the sum of its parts–and that is reflected in the resale value as well. Some Windows laptops will do specific things better (chiefly game support), but I didn’t find anything that was as good overall as an M1 Macbook Pro, and I say that as someone who had never owned a Mac of any kind, despite using PCs since the early 1980s and building them for the last 25 years.
I would have preferred a laptop that could run Windows or Linux, but I just couldn’t find anything that was a complete package like the M1 MBP.
I’m in exactly the same camp as you. I haven’t bought an M1/2 Mac for personal use yet since Linux support is not there yet, but that may change once Asahi + Fedora comes out
The features you talk about seem pretty easy to put in any laptop. Battery life? Laptop speakers? Screens? Metal case? But sure you get to go pay twice the price for an Apple tech to charge you to replace the entire internals for minor problems. Seems like y’all bought the Kool aid and didn’t try to find alternatives because you don’t mind throwing some extra money at it. If you throw enough money at anything, generally, you can make it good lol
You cannot understand the quality of apple unless you use it as a daily driver.
Are they a shitty company? Yes.
Do they design their products to be hard to repair? Yes.
Do they provide half baked products? No.
Can you find product that matches the performance, battery life, build quality, and weight? I don’t think so.
Nothing will come close with similar build quality. The XPS 13+ is probably the closest competitor to the 13" pro/air. But it has a 12th gen Intel CPU which will get awful battery life in anything but the most ideal scenarios.
With an Apple silicon Mac you have to try to get bad battery life, with an Intel Machine I can’t get it to have good battery life and do anything other than sit idle. AMD will come close, but few manufactures make a premium AMD laptop.
Who relies on the trackpad? Lol they are all annoying to use
Try macbook trackpad.
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Then you’d have a laptop twice as thick, 1/5th the battery life, be built worse, and have an awful trackpad.
You really don’t get any of those things. Be a Mac fan if that’s your thing, but don’t try to pretend they’re actually any better because all the PCs you’ve used have been trash.
I’ve yet to find a PC laptop that can replicate a Mac TouchPad. They’ve gotten better in the last few years, but are still miles off Apple.
They’re not better for everything, but some stuff they’ve absolutely nailed over the competition and it’s not even close.
If I’m honest I hate touchpads in general, even Macs. I’ve got a brand new top of the line Mac issued by my company. I use a mouse.
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What you using all that power for? Gaming? Not likely on Mac, Machine learning? Also not likely with that GPU… Maybe a Photoshop machine? Enjoy that non expandable ram.
For a nice dev machine I get it, nice battery life and watch Netflix on a screen, but it’s not like you can’t get a same performance machine for the same/lesser price with Dell/Thinkpad and use Linux…
That’s a rather narrow set of use cases. For example, they are audio and video editing powerhouses. Audio in particular is exceptional because of core audio in MacOS.
And upgradable components aren’t something 95% of the population is worried about. Max out what you need when you buy it. My last Mac lasted 8 years with no trouble. And by the time I was ready to upgrade, the bottleneck was mainly the cpu, which in a case of 8 years, that means a new motherboard, and at that point you might as well upgrade the whole computer, as standards have changed and updated.
Apple silicon has a pretty decent on-board ML subsystem, you can get LLMs to output a respectable number of tokens per second off of it if you have the memory for them. I’m honesty shocked that they haven’t built a little LLM to power Siri
I have a colleague that spends 90% of their time out of the office on trains and on airplanes. They need to connect to an RDP server, answer emails, and do some InDesign work. Our IT dept manager has the same attitude as you and will only issue them a beefy laptop that weighs twice as much as a macbook and has half the battery. My colleague has tried to explain that compute power is not their primary concern but the IT manager won’t listen because he doesn’t have the perspective to imagine what it’s like to do someone else’s job.
As an IT worker, it is more likely that they don’t want to deal with the headache of enterprise management of a Mac for just one person.
Just buying a Mac is easy, setting that Mac up to be monitored, managed, and secured centrally is a whole other issue. Especially when none of their current infrastructure supports Mac, because why would it when no one current uses one.
The user is worried about what type of device works best for their specific use. The IT manager is worried about what type of device do I have a licences for anti virus, what device can I audit security settings remotely, what device can I centrally manage updates, etc…
That being said, for personal use there is definitely a niche for Apple products. It just isn’t so clear cut when it comes to using those devices in an enterprise setting. And speaking from experience just one person never stays at one person. Once someone gets one, everyone will be saying “well, why can’t I get one too?”.
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Or a beefy laptop that can do more than send emails and Photoshop lol
Before I will even think about buying a Mac I will buy a Framework laptop and install debian.
And I don’t even use Linux outside of a home server.deleted by creator
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far beyond the close competition in both quality and performance
It’s true that Apple continues to be the king of build quality. And while they do currently hold the performance per watt crown, there are plenty of laptops that beat the M2 when it comes to raw performance, especially if you throw in a dGPU. And of course, none of this matters if the device doesn’t run the software you want, which is what I suspect most people on Lemmy have issue with.
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Windows : making Linux better by comparison!
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Yeah, I remember XP and Seven as solid OSes where everything just worked.
Now it’s a mix of crap, hey this app is in night mode, this one isn’t! Want to change a parameter? Ha ha you can’t! You want to share a folder? Good luck!
And it’s heuristics/analysis just because Windows is inherently insecure drags any pc down to a crawl…
And publicity??!
Aurgh
Windows 7 was peak Windows. They smoothed out all the problems of Vista (plus hardware caught up to the recommended specs) and all the new tech that Vista introduced matured a bit. Was one of the nicest looking operating systems they ever released too - though that is highly subjective.
Everything after has introduced some form of garbage in it’s iteration. Windows 8 had a garbage tablet interface that sucked when used with keyboard/mouse. Like the majority of devices that it was installed on. Windows 10 rolled back some of those shit changes but was the version Microsoft started implementing their adware. Windows 11 took it to 11 and put in a bunch of hardware requirements that conveniently required you to dump some money into Intel hardware.
Been running Linux for last six months and it is crazy how much better it runs. It isn’t as cumbersome to use as the old days… But every once in a while I run into something that requires Googling and tweaking in Terminal. It’s been my best experience with the OS though going back to WAY back (Mandrake and Slackware days - or are they still around? Early 2000’s maybe???)
Why cs3 when krita would have more features and be free? Familiarity?
Because I’m used to it I guess, and I haven’t found a single app that handles pixels and transparency well.
Like zoom in like crazy, update 1 pixel, save, transparency is still there.
Haven’t looked for a bunch of years though, maybe it’s time to try again :-)
Krita’s always done transparency just fine for me. It’s pretty good these days. There’s also a built in option to set your keyboard shortcuts to the same ones that Photoshop uses.
Well then I’ll have to re-check it out :-)
Cheers
Yeah, I try never to underestimate the value of sheer familiarity. New software is like breaking in a new pair of leather shoes, sometimes you have to bleed a little before your feet adapt and you adjust it to fit.
Or a whole lot if you go the Blender route…
I guess it’s like smoking.
You know it’s bad for you, and it costs a lot, but it’s a hassle to drop, so you just keep smoking anyway.
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That obviously sucks but it isn’t limited to windows, right?
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Since 1998
I switched to MacOS last year and it’s so much better. Considering a full Linux switch when this iMac is too old unless the VisionPros turn out to be as good as advertised
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That’s so they can run everything as SaaS and bill you monthly to use the computer you already paid for.
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MacOS has been fine for awhile now, but Apple’s hardware is very expensive. They’re great for productivity but not so much for gaming.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=beYODfD2ipo&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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This is pretty much my view, hardware is good, software is good, price is stupid, and Apple being Apple can suck. But I’m happy with it
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Dell precision 5570
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ive slapped mint on so many PCs… people barely know its not windows
most people only use the freakin browser
Its kinda why chrome os works. Majority of people only need the browser, and if you need basic office suite, google has their own cloud options.
Its when you have specific use cases when you HAVE to use a certain os over another (e.g gaming with anti cheat, AI/ML and engineering software is usually windows foward, adobe stability on OSX. A lot of backend and server applications on linux)
Unless you make it a point to procure an LTSC version, which Microsoft won’t even sell to you unless you have a site license.
LTSC is the only version of Windows that behaves like it’s still your computer, and I have uptime measured in months on a computer who serves Plex all day long.
I have a friend who runs MacOS too. She bought it used and it’s a desktop so it isn’t impossible to repair.
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ITT: folks who think Linux is too complicated or whatever, but are perfectly willing to jump through endless hoops to work around some of Windows’ deliberate hostility.
The Stockholm syndrome is real.
In my experience Linux usually has many more hoops…
I’ve reinstalled both Linux and Windows on the same machine a few weeks ago and it was considerably easier and faster to install Linux. It also had less problems post-install too.
Installing Linux is incredibly fast and easy, yeah. It’s everything you try to do after that. Unless you are a regular user and have commands memorized you need to open a browser and go look them up every time you need to do some basic shit. I’ve been using Linux off and on since 2008 and you just cannot say with a straight face that it is easier than windows.
I’m a developer, so I find it easier because dependency management is easier (especially if you have a good package manager, arch btw). WSL is improving but is still not enough for my needs (big projects that use usb are not well supported).
Opening up a browser to look up commands to copy and paste is a lot easier than looking up registry fixes and mimicking screenshots into GUIs. I fix Windows for a living and the crazy shit I see daily blows my mind. It seems like in Windows I’m doing the same thing multiple times until it (hopefully) works but in Linux the problem is easier to identify and fix.
folks who think Linux is too complicated or whatever
At one point this was true, but that was many years ago.
Unfortunately, that reputation has kind of stuck.
The barriers are still too steep. My Ubuntu machine updated it’s kernel and then refused to boot after that. I had to look up how to manually lock the old working kernel.
Windows has never completely broken itself on an update for me.
If that happened to my parents they’d be angrily driving to the shop to get another cheap windows laptop.
We have a phrase for a bricked windows install: it’s called the Blue Screen of Death. It’s not like Windows never gets fucked either.
I’ve personally never had such an issue upgrading Linux.
The BSoD isn’t always a bricked Windows machine, it’s often just an OS crash that causes you to restart the system.
Funny, I switched to Ubuntu because my brand new laptop was continually bricking with Windows 10, specifically due to Windows Update.
Roundabouts the time period of the forced Windows 10 update I had a desktop and laptop BOTH completely break, booting only to a black screen on startup, having received somewhere around half of an update I had no say in.
I’d like to think they’ve learned their lesson. I’d like to think I could safely leave a windows computer on overnight without waking up to a surprise new version, or bricked PC. But even having that as an outside possibility is enough to turn me off windows entirely.
Not really. You are underestimating how stupid the average person is. They cannot peel an orange.
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Microsoft only hurts me when I’m being a bitch. Its my fault. He’s normally really nice.
: folks who think Linux is too complicated or whatever, but are perfectly willing to jump through endless hoops to work around some of Windows’ deliberate hostility.
Man I realised this when I found myself running a third party program just to get my audio to simultaneously play out of multiple outputs on windows. I had regular issues with games and my killer ethernet adapter (they’re notoriously bad, but after switching to linux didn’t have any issues). Reformatting for home was getting longer and longer. Start menu search started to become slow and bogged down. Windows store was a nightmare. It was a constant battle to remove all the advertising and tracking “features”. I game, but mostly a PC for me is a tool. When a tool stops doing its job, it gets replaced.
Funnily, when I play games with my friends, I rarely have issues… but as soon as I do, they they’re pretty quick to jump down my throat about my OS of choice.
EDIT: WSL is pretty nice though, I use it on my work box.
I think Windows makes multiple audio input/output hard as a piracy measure and it drives me crazy as well. Perfectly good audio ruined the moment I plug my mic in. Makes it harder to game without a headset.
I feel like I get closer and closer every day, but video games still keep me anchored down
Have you heard of our Lord and Savior, Proton?
In the holy GNU scripture, we predict the second coming of Proton who will one day return to vanquish the evil Electron.
Out of curiosity: can you mod the game in Linux?
sure, Steam workshop works even identical
otherwise the game data paths are differentSteam workshop works even identical otherwise the game data paths are different
So if I understand this correctly:
The games files inside the game folder are the same, therefore when you apply/load a mod into the gamefolder it works the same correct?
If thats the case, this is the straw that makes me migrate to Linux. I currently have AMD CPU and GPU (because fuck nvidia, even if AMD is not that much better) and from my understanding they should have good drivers in Linux
the biggest difference to Windows gaming is that for Windows games on Linux played via Proton every game gets its own Proton/Wine prefix (basically a windows folder structure)
ifyou want to use mod manager you need to run them inside the game specific proton prefixSteam Tinker Launcher simplify this process
Yeah modding is basically the same assuming you don’t have to use some kind of installer for them then it would be a bit more complicated, however I’d imagine using wine would solve that for the most part (haven’t installed mods through an installer on Linux so can’t speak much on that)
And also you might need to learn where Linux stores those game files but you can always just use steam to directly open the game folder
I use Linux full time since 2020, and have known it since 2013~, but I don’t ever recommend it to anyone. It’s full of papercuts.
I actually like to be able to play games on my gaming PC so no thanks, I will stay with windows
That’s wholly your prerogative, but I just wanted to chime in and say - I was firmly in this camp too, but I’ve been restricted to a shitty second PC as I don’t have access to my usual rig at the moment. Decided it was the time to give Linux a shot after 4-5 years since last time. Every game I’ve tried has worked with 0 mucking around, outside of games I’m obtaining through uh, less ethical means, which don’t just install straight through Steam.
I know it’s only anecdotal and I’m not saying you have to change if you’ve got no reason to, but gaming isn’t really the reason it used to be for not using Linux. Unless you only play competitive shooters with Anti-Cheat that doesn’t work on Linux.
Not really an issue for basically any game these days. The Steam Deck running Linux has changed the game significantly. I play video games exclusively on Linux. I haven’t booted into my Windows SSD in months. Honestly considering nuking it and making it a game storage drive for Linux.
The amount of Steam games compatible with Linux is about 10 000.
The amount of Steam games compatible with Windows is about 70 000.
Stop claiming gaming on Linux isn’t an issue anymore. Yeah it is getting better, but it isn’t even close to what Windows has to offer at the moment.
This isn’t the full picture of those statistics. 10097 games have Platinum or Gold on protondb, out of 11223 with any results at all. It’s not that there’s 60k games broken on Linux, it’s that there just isn’t any data on those.
The only correct thing to do here is to extrapolate from the data we have, which is around ~90% of games work on Linux. So it’s more like 63 000 vs 70 000.
Of the top 1000 games on Steam, only 38 currently don’t run at all and 744 of those are Gold or Platinum status on ProtonDB. Having nearly 3/4 of the top 1000 games work flawlessly or nearly so is enough to not need Windows.
If for some reason it’s not, you could dual boot, but I haven’t run into a game in months I could not play.
Downgraded my new desktop computer from Win11 to Win10 this weekend. Still considering if I shouldn’t just go back to Linux now that Valve has made gaming on Linux viable…
Have you checked if your games are supported on ProtonDB?
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AFAIK ESO is working fine.
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I’ve been playing ESO through Lutris for a few years. It works great!
I’m holding out as long as I can on Win10 for gaming. It’s my hope that Linux gaming will be compatible with most of my games by the time I have to choose between Win11 and Linux. Last time I checked there were a few games I was interested in that weren’t completely compatible with SteamOS.
Baldurs Gate 3 has been working great for me on steam proton
It’s working pretty well on my steam deck for me but not without a few bugs. Nothing game breaking though. (I also had some different bugs on windows 10 so not sure how much is platform specific)
I doubt they are platform specific. I have not found any bugs playing on linux that windows didn’t also have.
I want to switch to gaming on linux so bad. Just a few weeks ago I ran into a sudden issue where any source game I launched in windows would crash my graphics driver, totally unrecoverable without restarting the PC (even shift+ctrl+win+b did nothing) and on some restarts I found myself being forced to boot on integrated graphics and fully reinstall drivers. Total shitshow, started while I was midgame and came out of nowhere, couldn’t figure anything out.
I finally gave up and installed mint, got steam set up and downloading, started moving over some my backed up files… only to find out that a thing I’d ordered to make my VR headset wireless wasn’t going to have Linux drivers. I was gonna have to dual boot windows at the very least. And I’ve had other experiences where Windows updates have broken Grub and forced me to do reinstalls as well, so…
The day can’t come fast enough where companies just build stuff for Linux. The Windows UI gets worse with every release, and it’s really not as bug-free as people seem to think, it just has market share and companies tend to build for it by default. Completely self-fulfilling prophecy.
I was gonna have to dual boot windows at the very least. And I’ve had other experiences where Windows updates have broken Grub and forced me to do reinstalls as well, so…
You didn’t have to reinstall. You just have to boot from a live USB and then run like three commands to fix it. But yes, that is indeed unironically more work to figure out and safely do.
When choosing the region/language, choose “English (World)”. Boom, bloatware be gone.
You can safely change it to your correct region once you’ve logged in (Note: the Windows Store won’t work until you do).
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Remember some ‘core’ apps, such as Paint and Calculator are delivered via the Store now too - so they’ll also be missing.
I’ll just pirate a version of paint
I can’t find a scenario where paint.net doesn’t come out on top when compared to the version of paint that ships with Windows and it’s free.
paint opens a bit faster, and often I want to just draw some stupid rectangles with 5 words and 4 arrows real quick and screenshot it and say “look here’s the mock-up”
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Are there laws in England that prevent bloatware?? That sounds like an EU thing, not an English thing. I would think the England install might be even more bloated than the US one.
Europe has “N” versions of windows that do not have media codecs, and a few basic applications installed (e.g basic video player)
Wish I knew about this a month ago when I installed Windows on an older machine that definitely doesn’t need anything but basic stuff.
Sorry about my shitty wording, none of the thr basic stuff is installed, its basically a version of windows that assumes you are going to install your own version of most basic apps. Basically a media player, (both video and music), voice recording, skype and such are NOT installed.
If youre on a device that needs no major feature updates except security ones, thats ehat the LTSB build is for. Getting one legally is difficult, however…
Yeah, I got that. That would have been perfect for my garage computer. A low spec machine that would just be hooked up to my CNC. I don’t need voice recording, media player and stuff like that. Bare bones would be perfect for that machine both in SSD space saved and (I assume) aslightly faster since the hardware is a few years old now.
We have English (United Kingdom) as a localised install.
Not any more bloated then English (US) but if this English (World) install is even cleaner as Andi says, I’ll start using that instead for fresh installs.
Nice Tip.
Why is this?
Because the paid-for “bloat” is per region. If you don’t define the region… taps side of forehead
Anyone got a spare Linux CD key?
You might like this little program: https://github.com/MrGlockenspiel/activate-linux
Yep, here you go: []
Thank you, now I’ve sucessfully activated GNU+Linux Mint.
Unironically I might for Lindows
I had not heard of Lindows. What a crazy world. Thanks for mentioning it.
My first introduction to Lindows was as a teenager in an internet cafe circa 2005. It was quite the novelty back then and we all got a good laugh out of it.
just use Ventoy.
Man I don’t miss Windows. Gaming, work, etc. all done on Linux here. I don’t even use my dual boot anymore. Haven’t for months. Probably need to just fully nuke my Windows drive and make it more storage for games.
I can’t upvote you hard enough. I built a new machine in April when it was finally time to get off of Windows 7. I thought I’d try gaming on Linux since I heard it got so much better. Holy shit has it gotten better! In the last 5ish months I’ve only found one game I couldn’t get to run and it was a demo. Starcraft 2, the new System Shock, pretty much everything I throw at it has been great. There’s never been a better time to not have a Windows partition!
Same, built a PC this year, Intel CPU and Radeon GPU. “Dual boot” with win10 for gaming but after booting back and forth a couple times to test performance it just stays in Linux 24/7. At least I did a big NTFS partition with my Steam library on it (Proton emulated games will run on both!), so it’s not like I’m out a ton of HDD space for the unused Windows system.
I ended my dual boot around Win XP days. I only saw the Win 8 horror in store displays, and I only installed Win11 one time. OMG it sucked - the hell was MS doing demanding I sign up a ms account to install an OS?
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Yeah, take the plunge! I never liked dual boot and even though I liked Linux since the late 90’s I never committed to it on my desktop due to it being mainly a gaming system. When Proton came around I dumped Windows and never regretted it :-). Especially after reading this article I’m happy I don’t have to deal with that crap!
If only my work supported Linux - Siemens TIA Portal, Rockwel Studio 5000, Mitsubishi RSWorks3 - they’re already struggling with Window$ updates, impossible to run on anything else.
Could those be run in a VM or a vApp deployment to avoid Windows Updates breaking them?
Been using Windows since XP, watched it get worse with every iteration while getting a shiny new exterior. Was finally forced from Windows 7 to Windows 10 a few years ago and the day Windows tries to foist 11 on me is the day I go fully down the Linux rabbit hole.
I’ve used Windows since 3.1. I thought XP was such a great advancement. I feel like 7 is overall better than XP, but not an all out improvement. 10 is worse than 7, but they’re forcing 7 out. I hate 11. I want to by a new PC, and 11 is the biggest thing holding me back. Could I buy it and install something else? Sure, but I don’t want to pay for this terrible program.
Getting “professional” versions and installing them has generally been the way to work around Windows bullshit. I haven’t gone to 11 yet, and the vibe I get from folks is that there is no escaping it. But folks have been saying that about Windows forever.
I have used professional versions of 10 through work, and they are better, but they still have a bunch of junk. I hear that Windows 11 is worse in this regard. It also still doesn’t fix the problem of encouraging MS to do these things. I’m not looking to build a PC, so I’d be buying something that comes preloaded with a consumer version, then need to buy a pro version, and now I’ve bought this crap twice, greatly rewarding MS for their poor practices.
System76 can sell you a computer with PopOS or Ubuntu installed straight from the factory!
I looked into this and didn’t find quite what I wanted, but it did lead me into a whole world of small computer assemblers I didn’t know about.
The enshittification started at Win 8 and has picked up speed.
People don’t like to believe it but this shit started back in 95/98 or even earlier. It’s kinda what Microsoft has always done.
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Your work sounds like it has no IT Security department and no HR department
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Lucky you. I got told by our IT that I’m going to be their windows 11 sacrificial lamb and will be getting it before everyone else to bang out the quirks. It doesn’t pay to be known as the office nerd :(
My elderly father’s win 10 computer has been absolutely shoving the upgrade down his throat, and I’m about ready to give in and just do it. Telling it to stop notifying him does no good, it just comes right back the next day. Then he won’t touch the computer because the full screen upgrade ad freaks him out and he’s afraid something is wrong. Screw Microsoft.
Switched my nearly 70yo mother to Mint and she’s actually pretty happy with it. If she can do it, anybody can
He’s a good bit older than that and has cancer, and is not able to sit at a computer long enough to learn a new operating system even if he wanted to. Which he really, really doesn’t lol. He hates the thing with the fire of a thousand burning suns and only used it for his necessaries.
I’m also not familiar with any other operating system besides windows, outside of a brief foray into pi-hole years ago that I don’t remember much about, so I’d have to learn it first. While I’d love to start playing around with Linux some day, unfortunately that day isn’t going to be any time soon.
I mean…who are you kidding, you probably will.
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I refuse to update my laptop
Is it your laptop, or is it their laptop? If it’s yours, you have every right to request that they issue a corporate laptop if they need you to use Windows 11 to do your job. Otherwise, it’s time to grow up - it’s not like they’re forcing you to commit an OSHA violation.
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Carl?!
My laptop upgraded to Windows 11. It broke the headphone jack and built in speakers. The computer just doesn’t detect them anymore. O_o
Windows 11 would CONSTANTLY turn off my headphones microphone at a hardware level. Running the “recording audio” troubleshooter was the only way to fix. Probably the only thing that windows troubleshooter fixed for me in 25 years.
Linux Mint worked out the box never going back. Feel bad for people who need Adobe.
I’ve had this happen too, multiple times. It’s a pain in the ass to fix, and I have no idea where to start. I know you can force block driver updates for your speakers through windows update somewhere, that prevents this thing from happening again.
I remember when I first installed Linux. I thought it was broken because it was so clean and distraction free.
I thought it was broken when I told it to poweroff and suddenly it just died. Nope, apparently that’s just how linux normally shuts down.
This will help get rid of some of the bloat. I run this on every w11 install I do.
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutilThis is one of the best tools I’ve used, works really well!
I just reinstalled Windows after not having a computer for a long time. I’m glad I just happened across this beforehand because it was the best.
Everyone should use this to some extent, even just to disable tracking
It’s awesome right?? Really impressed with the tool!
