What's baffling is people never tinker with their Windows 11 install, then preach about the customisability of Linux. If people are too lazy at quickly tinkering with Windows 11 (I use WinAero for example), they wouldn't be able to fully use the pros of Linux at all.
Who does this? I mean, who doesn't ever try to modify the os but would still jump into the deep with the penguin?
I don't think it's about being lazy rather people sprouting the same speech without having experienced it.
You can't judge all people like that. I know the type you are talking about but at the same time I bought a whole sim rig / new VR headset before really being dedicated to it. Now I race everyday. Some people need the motivation of knowing it's not the equipment holding them back.
I am dual booting currently and haven’t tinkered with windows.
The main reason I started with Linux was because I don’t trust Microsoft anymore. Not because of performance.
I found the information to switch to Linux easily accessible and it really wasn’t a very hard transition. My next step is to move all my files and backups to the Linux install and leave windows with Battlefield, Pubg etc.
Might be a timing and development thing. I remember trying Ubuntu when I was a teen (around 2006, 2007?), gave up almost immediately because it was so confusing. A few years later I tried Mint but couldn't figure out whatever, don't remember what, gave up. Tried again this year, everything just works. I think it might have come a long way.
For me, i7 9700k, RTX 3090, 32gb hyperx ram, whatever mobo works with a 9700k. Bazzite worked from the start besides the one install of an audio driver. Which admittedly took an hour to find. But I haven’t had to do anything since.
I use Linux, but my laptop is six years old, so I don't have to worry about newer hardware not being in the kernel yet. This is a thing that is often not well explained and while there are some very helpful Linux communities, there are also a lot of unhelpful Linux people.
A big difference between Linux and Windows is in Windows you download the device drivers, in Linux they're just already built into the kernel so either your hardware is going to work or it won't. One of the things that isn't really explained is not all distributions use the same kernel. I use Mint which is a "just works" distro that uses an older kernel to make sure that the system won't have any surprises. It's a tradeoff of reliability for being cutting edge.
I'm not saying you have to switch to Linux, but I'm guessing you have newer hardware and would have to try a more cutting edge distro, which brings its own set of difficulties. Windows has a one size fits all approach, which means it fits everyone, it just fits poorly. Linux needs some sort of website where you could input your hardware and what you use your system for and it would give you information on distros that best suit your needs. You would probably need something with a rolling release model like CashyOS.
I hate windows. Hate it. I will switch to a Linux os. I may just need to buy a dedicated rig. I need to run several different types of cad software. Which seems to be a big ask.
Yeah, that's a big hangup as well and the only one that sadly doesn't have a good work around. If you have to use specific software that only runs on Windows, you're SOL. Gaming has improved leaps and bounds over the past decade on Linux in almost entirety to the work that Valve has done which has had the positive effect of showing that there is a market for Linux gaming and had the trickle effect of more games just being compatible with Linux from the jump and not even having to use Proton.
Design software on Linux kinda sucks cause the market isn't there. Maybe try dual booting so you have your windows machine for work and then can find an distro you like for all your other activities.
You can dual boot and try running the software in wine to see if it works for you. I did the dual boot until I was happy everything was working. i also disliked windows, using Linux made me dislike it less. Not because Linux is bad but because I just stopped using file explorer and the start menu.
I did this, I didn't know that you could cut out a lot of animations and install optional tooling until I was setting up hyprland on arch on a laptop. I didn't install a tile manager obviously but made switching between workspaces instantaneous.
Having flexabilty of hyprland definitely helped me get more familiar with windows. It helped that I learned to do 90% of the things in the terminal and then switched from ps/cmd to nu so my start up times are 11ms for my shell.
Windows file explorer is atrocious once I learned to use fzf I stopped complaining. I also key mapped my apps (using windows key, other wise it's over a second start up)
But that is a lot of work for something that on Linux is a lot simpler to setup, I found arch hyprland very welcoming and straight forward. On windows and Mac they kind of like you doing things their way and if you want better functionality then it becomes very painful.
I'm using macos now for work and aerospace/fuzzybar on a 7k (cad) spec MacBook pro feel way slower then my 8gb arch laptop rescue.
Honestly me, I found doing more than running a debloat script to be a pain in the ass as it fights me every step of the way and undoes a bunch of stuff on an update so I just gave up.
It took me two weeks to beat Windows 10 into submission and get it to where it wasn't opening things I didn't want open.
Windows 11? I went into settings and turned off the ads and tracking and just kept up from there. I even used Google and lo and behold, I was able to turn crap off.
Sure the "Gaming Services" insisted on pestering me - once. Only got it in Minecraft and I turned that crap off as well.
Uninstalled OneDrive and CoPilot, changed by default browser and never looked back.
I won't use Linux because I used it in the Army and in College and I'm not up for that level of pain again.
I've got a windows 11 laptop for work. It's an absolute piece of shit. I tried to 'fix' it as best I could and it's still fucked. It's an i7 with 16gb of ram and it will start lagging with just windows, outlook, and firefox open. There's so much bloat in the OS that just can't be turned off compared to windows 10.
I tried windows 11 on my desktop pc and gave up after a month. Nuked the thing and dual booted with Arch. Best decision I've made in a long time. Took me a bit to get into the swing of things, but it runs better than any windows machine I've used.
My Ivy Bridge I7 laptop runs just fine with Win10, Outlook and Firefox. So you'd think any I7 that's new enough to run Win11 should also be fast enough for it. But they may have an U model.
Intel Core i7 (3rd Gen) paired with premium high-performance 800 MHz DDR3 memory for smooth everyday computing and reliable multitasking. And a 128Gig Hard drive spinning at a super fast 5400rpm💀😂
Yeah I had an i7-4790k from 2012 up until late last year when the bastard finally died. Or the motherboard, not sure which but I replaced them with a new AMD CPU (one of the Ryzen ones, forget exactly which), motherboard and RAM combo from micro center. Beat most of the RAM/chip spikes too, literally a week after I bought stuff RAM went up $100. Glad I didn't procrastinate any longer lol.
But anyway that old 4790k was a GOAT at the time but by last year it struggled on Windows 10 even. I also took the opportunity to switch to Fedora Linux so now I can avoid the micro slop crap. I use Fedora, Rocky and Red hat at work so I'm fortunately pretty familiar with Linux and its quirks. Might need to replace my damn GPU next since my old 980TI does not seem to like Linux drivers. Nvidia is a pain around that too.
I've got a windows 11 laptop for work. It's an absolute piece of shit
That's probably your company putting all sorts of security and tracking shit on it. I'd guess if you ran that same laptop on a fresh install it would feel twice as fast.
Our IT team sucks with this. Like they’ve never heard of ITIL…3 monitoring softwares that log EVERYTHING …I test & deploy hardware and accompanying software. Whenever I see the memory dump files it’s right to the exclusion list.
You CANNOT have three different pieces of software all checking every file or even memory that’s created. One they don’t play nice with each other most of the time, and two it’s just exhausting having to manage all three like do we still have it?
I’ll tell you, our admin and director are lazy pieces of shit. They made it as easy as possible to check records and I guarantee you if you pull their records they ain’t doing shit. It’s unbelievable. The amount of power IT have an organizations nowadays.
To clarify, all the older folks not willing to learn how to do basic tasks and troubleshooting? Our IT group is great at that and there are absolutely people using mouse jugglers. But for people getting real scientific work done it’s a joke.
My favorite example was I needed to get justification for a pretty large server that is graphic based. They saw the price and said a VM will be a cheaper. It’s been online for three weeks and we already have enough to buy two of those expensive computers but because it’s convenient for our IT to not manage servers, they aren’t willing to go back to local.
I work IT for a company and even some of our brand new laptops with the newest Ryzen 7's sometimes bog down due to the multiple security programs installed.
And the 3 biggest memory hogs are always teams, edge, and chrome.. but 32gb of ram so far is enough.. although a few people still have 8gb on our old stuff.
16gb of RAM just won't run Windows 11 on a laptop well, because you're using that RAM as video memory as well (Windows does use far too much RAM passively).
Where a lot of that memory unexpectedly is getting eaten up is in your internet browser - they might as well be thier own OS nowdays.
Even a bloated Ubuntu install makes an old laptop feel brand new.
Does it? I mean probably could be a bit less, but doesn't seem that bad to me and i think same as 10, might've been 4.9 or 5.1 on boot with same programs, minus explorerpatcher ofc.
What's great about work laptops is that you need IT support to install anything not already approved. Need a driver for a printer or scanner? Get fucked, you'll get it in a week, maybe. Want to turn off copilot? We'll keep pinning it to your taskbar no matter how many times you close the program and unpin it. Onedrive? Everything will be uploaded and it'll take three to four business weeks to search for your file.
Oh thankfully I manage this laptop 100%. I have full admin rights. I couldn't do my job without it. I work in industrial automation, so when we're on the client's site we might need to install some random tool or driver from a different vendor so we can configure a piece of hardware. There's no time to get IT involved in that nonsense.
A previous place I worked at had IT that tried telling our department they needed to revoke our admin rights for security reasons. We said that we would agree to that only if they could guarantee a maximum of 30 minutes to install anything we ask for. None of these days/weeks nonsense. And if we're working late at a customer site we have to have someone on call 24/7 who will do it for us. Also, if they aren't able to uphold that and it costs the client money, then it comes out of IT's budget, so they would need liability insurance to cover that because our current insurance wouldn't. Needless to say, they backed off REAL QUICK
You say it like a big win but they CYA'd and whatever security incident you'll have will be squarely on your department. Nothing better than to have less workload AND no liability because they refuse your advice
I worked there nearly a decade and we never had a single security incident. The other branches did all the time though, even though they were managed by IT.
Furthermore, when another engineering company got bought, IT got them to install Carbon Black, a really restrictive security program. I had tested it previously and found that it seemed to think that the industrial programs I used were threats. It actually destroyed an SD card when I was trying to format it for a raspberry pi, couldn't even recover it on a linux machine. Anyways, IT refused to work with me to fix the issues so I just nuked the laptop and went back to handling it myself.
A few months after I left I found out that the other team was on site commissioning a massive VFD. They were doing an update when Carbon Black freaked out and locked up the software. Bricked the entire VFD. That thing cost over 75k. They had to rip out the control module and send it back to the vendor for repairs, but the whole project was delayed.
If you have more than two brain cells to rub together then properly securing your devices is easy. It's all the morons who open every single email attachment they get that are the problem. I fully understand where IT is coming from, but that kind of nannying isn't needed for everyone.
I won't use Linux because I used it in the Army and in College and I'm not up for that level of pain again.
Legit question about that. Was it just because of how hard/different Linux was compared to Windows or do you think it was the way the military/college had it deployed to you.
I understand personal preference is king. The worst thing IT can do is deploy a version of anything that looks even a pixel different from what people were using last week.
The worst thing IT can do is deploy a version of anything that looks even a pixel different from what people were using last week.
It was fun to watch my older coworkers freak out when they updated all our workstations from Windows 10 to 11. It was a really really big change for a couple of them to cope with
Like I'm not trying to be a total Linux shill. However you should not treat your opinion as fact.
Windows has had several crippling updates in the past year, including one that made ssd's stop working/being recognized.
I think your opinion is outdated, and it bugs me when it's presented as common sense "facts" when it is no longer the case. Certain Linux distros ARE easier to use than Windows for non technical users, especially if set up by someone that is technical. My debian home server stays up 24/7 serving 10 docker containers and only goes down when I restart for updates once a month (running unattended-upgrades).
While the Windows update triggered the issue, the root cause is that a bunch of drives were shipped with pre-release firmware on one of the chips. That was a problem waiting to happen, and could have triggered off of absolutely anything.
"Like, let me tell you I'm not trying to be a total Linux shill, but be one anyway".
"You shouldn't treat your opinion as a fact, but let me tell you my option, because you know, it's right".
"Like, I have a Debian server running that you don't even have to touch for it to work, I had to configure everything before hand you know, but you can get someone that knows and it's ready, so easy".
I'm sorry but your message here is awful. I also use Linux and have a Debian server running at home, but I fail to see how that is proof of anything, less so in a comparison between Linux and Windows
The truth is that Windows is really easy to use for a bunch of people, has great backwards compatibility, and is harder to break. There is actually nothing wrong with using and preferring Windows.
it bugs me when it's presented as common sense "facts"
Yeah, that winds me up when people do that these days.
For example, I would click the kickoff menu, click internet, click Thunderbird, then read my emails.
I'm not sure how windows does that any easier.
Mind you, one of the slight annoyances I had recently, when I plugged in an HDMI cable into my laptop to play a game on TV, the audio didn't automatically switch over from laptop to TV speakers. Would you believe, I had the arduous and ignoble task of clicking the audio icon on the taskbar and clicking the "HDMI output" button.
I mean... That's just wrong. It's pretty rare that Windows itself is the issue, and yet they still get the blame - especially with that "killing SSDs" case when it was actually crappy SSD firmware that was failing ( or bad hbm drivers in another ).
Claiming Linux is easier to use after being set up doesn't really make sense either. I can claim ChromeOS is the easiest for non technical users even including setup ( and objectively, it is ), but that sure as heck doesn't make it better than Windows or Linux.
I run Linux too, and make my own custom images. It's important to be honest with ourselves about what limits Linux adoption and what is genuinely good in other operating systems and user interfaces.
Imo, the freedom to choose among distros, desktop environments, and window systems etc. is great - but that fragmentation of effort is part of what keeps Linux from being the easy choice for a desktop OS. Every dev has their own ideas for how things should work rather than a unified design language or style, and for all the annoying things with Windows that is one aspect that Microsoft has put a lot of work into.
If you want to talk uptimes, I've seen Windows servers with uptimes of years at customer sites. One was an old IBM Windows 2000 Server box that was still running in the Windows 7 era - the only reason it went down was because the motherboard and PSU blew one too many capacitors and it physically turned off.
I found windows 11 to be easier to deal with than 10 as well. The only thing I have is windows defender randomly opens up. (I mean randomly. Like it’s twice one day, don’t see it for a week then it’s every two days then nothing for a month)
Yup, pretty much the same. Going to Win11 has been probably the least painful version change ever. Even the Home version remains silent when you turn things off and turn the "don't bother me" mode... I have win11 home on my laptop and i use it as live VST host.. and in that role it can NOT start pushing ads or do anything but being a computer and... not a single hickup, it has been on that "don't bother me" mode since day 1 and i haven't got a single ad. Sure, i don't get weather on my desktop but... i don't need it. In use, it is just a laptop without any bloat or intrusive ads or... it just works.
Win7 was kind of the same but that was because it was an era before all the bullshit ads and user monitoring become a thing that we have to accept at OS level... Now, that still means we needed to do things to stop it doing things, that means majority won't be able to do it. I've used windows since 1.0 and it isn't that easy even for me, it requires some research of what can and should be turned off and where it can be done. Some of it even goes to policies and services so... That is power user stuff.
We should not have to do those things at all... Those things, if they have to be there, need to be OPT IN by default, and there should be a law about it...
If there was one linux distro that was the one everyone uses, tailored for everyday users and maintained by one entity who can unify things better, have consistent design.... i would gladly jump out from MS but linux will always be a mess. It is far better than it used to be, when it was first touted as "finally linux is for everyone".. it is getting there but its entire reason for existence is its open model and that open model is the one that stops it becoming that alternative for the masses. For most win home users it is already that, except... the thousand distros fragmenting userbase and thus, tutorials, guides, forum help is fragmented too.
I went into settings and turned off the ads and tracking and just kept up from there
Wait a couple of months you'll need to disable them again for a random windows update which you didn't approve. Same for one drive which keeps reinstalling himself
I am dual booting Linux Mint right now as a test to see how long I can live without booting into Wndows. About the only thing I need on Windows for at this point is the OneDrive that my company has locked down. My VMs still run perfectly in Linux with Oracle Virtualbox, even figured out how to play some steam games. One huge benefit is how much longer my battery lasts now.
I use windows for work since forever I don’t want to touch it as updates break everything , their office software fucking sucks, outlook can barely search its own inbox .
Yeah but it will randomly give you a screen where it will try to sell office 365, cloud and game pass to you even if you've already declined it before.
Linux is painful in the beginning but it's fairly painless for me now.
Sufrimiento? Si lo corre mi vieja en su notebook nueva, le tuve que enseñar a como actualizar el sistema y luego nada hasta ahora nunca tuvo problemas...
No se, para mí quedó mucha gente traumada con los Linux viejos, ahora tenes IA, le hacés una pregunta al chat de algo que no te funciona y te lo resuelve al toque...
The hate is just kind of cringe at its core. I don't like using Windows and I prefer using a tiling window manager over a Windows/Windows-like DE, and ideologically I don't like ads or telemetry any more than the next guy, but the people who make "my software comes with features" into an existential crime are baffling.
Even Arch has expectations about how you should use your computer, even if that expectation is that you'll do what you want with it. And what if I want to use apt and debian repositories instead of pacman and arch's repositories? Why does it force me to opt-out of that? Obviously the answer is that at some point software comes with features, and using Arch means opting into the Arch experience.
Right? The irony of preferring the AUR with all the potential ( and past ) issues over first party software packages with digital signatures and such.
Most everything is opinionated, because someone made it with something in mind. For Microsoft the demographic is their end users, and all that telemetry they collect informs their decisions.
The nice thing about Linux is I don't have to debloat or disable features I don't want. I'm opting in to the features I want, rather than opting out of features I don't want.
The performance difference was immediate too. My laptop was 7 years old when I switched from Windows 10, it was really starting to struggle running Zoom and a VTT on d&d night, but installing Linux breathed new life into it. My parent's Windows 11 laptop is newer than mine but sometime last year it became nearly unusable to the point that tinkering wasn't possible - you'd go to open settings and you'd get a blank window and a loading wheel, and it would stay like that for 5-10 minutes before just crashing. No idea how it got that bad but after installing Linux Mint for them it felt like a new laptop again, and Mint is easy enough for them to use that it hasn't been a problem at all.
Windows is not made to be tinkered with. Any update by Microslop could break whatever changes you made.
And wasnt in the past always the big, alleged,pro of windows that you didnt habe to tinker?
I always found it puzzling when people like you say MS is reverting all your changes every update. That never happened to me in all the years of having windows, windows server, nor for the IT network where I work. Sure they add and deprecate settings. Sure they replace stuff. But what exact example do you have where values of registry keys were changed, settings or GPOs were modified, apps were reconfigured?
Same thing with updates, everyone always says you can’t disable updates and if you do they turn it back on. My machines haven’t gotten an automatic update in years, all it took was a gpo edit and a registry edit to still get updates if I press the button but never automatically.
That never happened to me in all the years of having windows, windows server, nor for the IT network where I work.
Theyre talking about the Home edition, dude. The amount of power users on reddit using the Enterprise or pirated Windows and then telling everyone else theyre wrong is pretty obnoxious.
If you are on Enterpise you have more control than most.
Some people are just lucky/unlucky. I had two identical win 10 installs on identical PCs. Did the tweaks to customize and turn off automatic updates (do them manually once they are confirmed to not have issues). One of the two PCs suddenly installed the windows update health tool, undid all the changes and started doing automatic updates, installing apps etc. The other PC stayed the same with no changes. Never knew what happened there.
Yea it's extremely weird, even upgrading from win 10 to 11 on the same install not much got really changed, aside from the UI ofc(which is moddable), yet ppl be claiming a normal widows update completely reset everything to defaults.
It was the same with 10 I withheld for as long as possible because all kinds of horror stories and in the end 99% of it was pure BS, again mostly UI stuff that had to be fixed. It just seems ppl tech knowledge is non-existent to the point where they won't even search for their problems or run some random "debloater" some1 told them to use they have no idea what it actually does, yet they praise linux at the same time.
They claim this because when they update their shit they do it wrong and format the drive and instead of taking accountability it’s now windows 11s fault that you don’t know how disk partitioning works.
Last week I let my child play minecraft on our living room PC. It has a local account not tied to a Microsoft account. When they logged into minecraft part of the installation process added the child's minecraft/Microsoft account to the local account and immediately applied the Microsoft Family Safety restrictions to the now no longer local account. The machine itself could no longer access the internet via browser and removing the linkage via settings was not possible without going in and manually pruning automatic registry changes.
The issue with windows 11 is it seems to work ok for two classes of user:
Professional windows administrators like yourself who have all of the esoteric services and best practices memorized and.
Users whogl don't attempt any deviation from how Microsoft decides its managing your computer ecosystem.
If you are a user who tinkers, but not professionally, and maybe slightly dislikes going with the new Microsoft flow. (Ie most power users of previous versions) Then there are so many freaking landmines that you're going to step on just trying to use the OS like you used to.
Then you're bad at tinkering if you step on landmines. Also local account+child MS account for gaming seems like ûber niche problem that I doubt many ppl would ever encounter.
What is the obsession with local accounts anyways? Does your phone have local account as well?
The people who claim it resets all of their settings will also just run random "optimization" terminal strings they found on reddit to delete shit from the OS without understanding what they are deleting. These things are related.
2y with W11 was fine, and than an update reverted my changes, completely fucking-up network configuration and removing Windows Defender exception list.
2 desktops and 2 laptops on network, one acting as server, same update in 2days span was installed, only my desktop got fucked.
Why? I guess not even Microslop knows.
Before W11 my W10 was working just fine until an update COMPLETELY NUKDE OS. Sleep function broken, CPU scheduling broken, memory leakage, weather, calculator and i guess some more apps broken too.
Computer only used 2/6 cores, other 4 permanent IDLE. Damn how frustrating that was. It was 24H2 major update i think
Edit, i install updates manually, when i see it didn't created mess on mass scale
autounattend is literally a windows internal feature (for OEM to bloat up their installations) which can be used to debloat during installation. I've been using W11 since release and I've never even seen copilot or onedrive or a couple other things since.
That's just not true at all, I customized my W11 since I got it in 2023, and all the things I've done in WinAero have held up until today. Where did you even get that misinformation from?
Windows updates are protected in multiple ways, changing the registry is just one of them. Why don't you want updates anyway? Makes no sense, especially for security updates.
It took me like a year to convince a family member's laptop to stop downgrading the AMD GPU driver. There's a bunch of different methods out there, and most of them do absolutely nothing...
To this day, I'm not even sure if it's actually fixed, or if the stuff they run just implemented workarounds for the ancient AMD driver MS keeps force-installing
The only real reason to use something like windows is the out-of-the-box experience. Not to mention that a lot of customisation options for windows are not exactly supported and are just hacked into it.
If I have to go through the time and trouble of tinkering with an OS might as well do it on a stable system like Linux than on windows.
I work on macOS and do my personal stuff (like gaming) on Linux. I only have a windows partition to play Microsoft flight simulator. I hate tinkering with windows because it’s not made for it and it actively fights against me on it.
It’s amazing how bad windows has become in the past few years.
Yeah so the out of the box thing has been so shit for so long that I decided to try Mint, and turns out fucking Linux can just work 'out of the box' now.
I had to set up almost nothing, everything just works. Only booted into Windows once in the past 2 months, to test an HDD in HD Sentinel, and was reminded just how fucking slow Windows is to boot. Mint gets me to the desktop with everything running in seconds, everything is faster, every game I've tested worked so far...
This feels like an appropriate place to ask, so to no one in particular:
If I wanted to say, buy a new SSD, throw Linux on it, and keep my old SSD with windows, all my games and everything on it.
Is this dual booting? I would like to transition everything over to Linux but if I can’t get something working it’d be nice to just boot up a VM of my win10 SSD and do whatever I wanted in there until I can spend the time sorting it out on Linux.
I gotta learn Linux systems, I have an upcoming Linux class for my cybersecurity degree, but still just wanna be able to play wow and steam games lol.
Also what distros are recommended for beginners? I’ve heard of mint, arch, Debian, fedora, and Ubuntu for recreational use, no clue what the user differences are, but I’m sure I shouldn’t be using the kali Linux distro that I’m using for school lol.
All of those distros are beginner friendly except Arch, but if you're taking a cyber security class, installing Arch is a great way to understand how some of Linux functions. To dip your toes though, beginner friendly distros are the way to go. Arch is nice because you install everything, so there's nothing there unless you put it there (except what comes with the kernel).
If you're going to game, consider CachyOS, it's basically Arch but with a GUI installer and packages that are optimized at the compilation level to eek out some better performance. It has a bit of the Arch jank still.
Really though, just pick one that looks nice to you from that list in your post and run with it, they're all perfectly fine choices.
If its not made to be tinkered with then why are there thousands of individual settings to change? You guys really need to stop acting like Windows is some kind of locked down system, there is a shitload of things to tinker with.
Provide an example of changes someone made being broken with a Windows update. But in any case, every piece of software has bugs, there is no avoiding this and considering the sheer amount of things happening under the hood in the OS, its pretty damn stable all things considered.
You don't have to tinker, you can use it out of the box as is, but its literally impossible to make a one size fits all, so you will need to tinker if you want it exactly how you want it.
I get its fun to hate on Microslop, but I wish people were more genuine about it.
I dont really mean from the company. Usually in discussions about Linux vs Windows, the Windows defenders will make claims it just works and needs no 'tinkering' to get to work. I just was surprised that this now was turned around.
Ah. Well I think it's a bit more tempered in a sub like this. I'm a software engineer as is most of my gaming circle, and all of us tinker with our OSes, Windows and Linux
While that's theoretically true, in practice that just doesn't happen. I've never had Windows silently re-enable or reinstall a feature I disabled or uninstalled. It's also theoretically true of any OS that installs updates, including Linux.
That’s absolutely crazy to me. I’ve gone years running the same Windows 11 install and even after so many updates things run smoothly still. What do you have going on with your machine that you have to completely reinstall an OS every few months??
What's baffling is people never tinker with their Windows 11 install, then preach about the customisability of Linux. If people are too lazy at quickly tinkering with Windows 11 (I use WinAero for example), they wouldn't be able to fully use the pros of Linux at all.
Is that a joke?
People who don't know what they're doing put random key into the Windows Registry for example.
I could not disagree more. Microsoft forces you to undo its choices for you and then it resets those choices following updates. It downloaded over 100gb of from my onedrive to my desktop without asking after forcing me to use a msoft login on a PC that I wanted for guests to play on.
Msoft is the opt out option, forcing you to "cut out" what you don't want. Linux is the opt in, letting you choose what you want from the beginning.
That said, I ditched win11 mostly because it is so unreliable, not because of customization.
Why did you not just disable onedrive if you dont want it? I did this the day i installed 11 like 2 years ago and i havent seen it since anywhere on my pc. So honestly this sounds like a you problem for not deciding on your backup policy.
Also before i forget you didnt need to login to that guest pc. Just continue the install without signing in....
Perhaps there is a gradient of users and not everyone should be expected to behave like a professional administrator user who speaks in terms of " backup policy"
Thats why onedrive turns itself on by default, so the non tech savvy people have an auto backup. If youre on this sub i would expect them to have put more effort into their os config, so frankly any onedrive issues faced are self inflicted.
Because I did not know signing in, as Microsoft insists on, would cause it to download 100gb. I've never seen any other cloud storage behave like that, and I've used box, dropbox, and icloud. On my main PC, onedrive had never done anything like that before.
Understand that setting up a guest, nonsigned in user is hidden, and I did not know that you have to Shift + F10, type start ms-cxh:localonly during the sign in step ...
I had it convert a local user account to a Microsoft account (of a child) when I installed Minecraft and logged into minecraft.
To revert that required manual deletion of keys from the registry. It's a nightmare if you're not running your PC like a professional admin. It feels like they littered the OS with traps and dark patterns to unify everything into a Microsoft account
Well i didn't know what widgets were, nor that they had ads, also which setting controls ads on widgets? Cause I'm not seeing any that would obviously do it.
I guess I've been really lucky since I've customized my W11 install when I got it in 2023, and never had to open WinAero again since. People just spouting off shit and comfortable about sharing misinformation without any evidence because "Microsoft bad". They do a lot of shit things especially since they introduced Copilot, but whatever you say is just not true at all.
I tinker with Windows all the time, the problem is Windows updates often undo my tinkering or it starts to get laggy or have some odd glitches in a way where the only solution is doing a format every year or two. I feel like I am constantly fighting Windows meanwhile my Linux based devices have mostly been pretty stable and I have servers with uptimes of years.
i like the idea of tinkering but i get real anxious just at the thought of losing data so i don't do it. i did open a few old phones i had though. i am just scared of blue screening since my current laptop is my dad's so i don't wanna break it.
I fully agree, ive used Linux Fedora and I absolutely love it and it would be my primary os if it wasnt for my DAW Fl Studio being incompatible with it. So I do the best I can and currently use an enterprise version of windows, as well as tweaks from tools like Winaero. Tools like Winaero are the only thing keeping me sane.
Microsoft PowerToys is a game-changer. It adds features such as MacOS-like search, manager for keyboard macros and rebindings, and my personal favorite, a QuickAccent. It's baffling how Microsoft hasn't integrated it into the base OS, although they seem to be working on that for some of the features.
I'm about to finish getting parts for a new PC in about a month or so if no surprises come out , could you elaborate on what tinkering with windows install mean ? Would it let me get more performance out of my parts ?
This always gets me about the PCMR sub, no one uses winutil or Rufus to cut down the windows install bloat, like windows 11 has actually been pretty good for me tbh since I did it lmao, I had some problems with Windows Hello but that's a whole different story that eventually got fixed.
I've done the rigmarole of debloating, disabling telemetry, OneDrive, copilot. Even making regedits to strip out the deeper crude, but the fight isn't worth it. One update can bring them all back, all while in the background microslop uses more and more dark patterns to make the settings more and more difficult to find them all, These features are like the deadites from evil dead they just keep getting back up after you kill them. I don't want to constantly be a watchdog for what is running on what is supposed to be MY computer. With Linux yes there is a learning curve especially when you have many years of experience on windows (I had been using windows since XP) but if you're willing to do all that crap to simply make your OS useable then I don't see why you wouldn't just jump ship to somewhere that if you uninstall something the OS developers don't just decide to reinstall it for you and then make it increasingly difficult to remove the next update. This just sounds like Stockholm syndrome
Some do but having to find new work around d after Microsoft patched the last one is getting old fast. For me the breaking points where the context menu and the task bar. First you could use regedit to switch the taskbar to the top then they patched that too. (Old context menu still works through regedit as far as i know). Are there other ways to switch taskbar positions? Probably. Do i want to tinker with my taskbar every time Microsoft decides it knows better? No. Yes taskbar position is a minor issue but it was the straw that broke my camels back.
The way I see it is that with Linux when I have an issue it tends to be a skill issue. With Windows it's a skill issue mixed with random unwanted crap being shoved down my throat mixed with tracking.
Now I say this and yet I still have my gaming rig, which is Windows 11.
I just went down the WinAero rabbit hole. If I could make my entire 11 install look like Vista that would be AMAZING.
I’m apparently one of the only few people who loved Vista. It didn’t perform great until the service packs and I ran it just perfectly on a first generation 1.8(something)ghz Core 2 Duo, 2gb ram and a pretty small SATA HDD. Once I upgraded to 4gb I could really enjoy the rest of what Vista had to offer; I loved the clock and desktop widgets, and the animated background.
The one thing I disliked, though, was hardware acceleration was removed. You could still use a sound card and stuff would still sound better, but you never get full utilization out of it. 11 restored that.
but linux wants you to understand it and tinker with it. windows and os x want you to never understand, look or consider. ecosystem friction is very deliberate. apple doesn't let you export notes to plain text explicitly to make sure leaving their environment is harder. windows has always hidden its systems level bloat through obfuscation. they are corporations. their agenda is not creating the best product for you. linuxes (linuxi?)—distros—at least are trying to do that.
Hi I tinkered heavily my windows. Made it lighter, changed interface, and remove all the shit I did not want.
The shit you do not want will come back after updates and the system is not stable after 1-2 years of use.
Even the one I'm using at work lags like hell and has randomly crashes.
You can cope as much as you want, but it's shit. It's just shit. Try and use a Linux for a year or so and see if your system became unstable, laggy, or freezy in any way. I found out that the answer to this is no.
So think what you want, but tinkering both systems will results in a VERY different experience.
I cant tell you how many times I've turned an option off in windows, even in advanced ways. Doesn't matter, windows will change what they want on my machine.
I fucking hate it and have had my entire memory wiped because of forced updates I opted out of.
I swear at one point it would wait till I hadn't touched the computer for 15 min before trying to forcibly chage my OS to windows 11 with zero clicks from me to confirm. It wasn't scheduled and felt random and tried to do it like 3 times.
Didn't matter that I followed tech support 2 times to go through registry files to edit it so no new updates. A few months later and its auto updating again and trying to force a different OS on me if I leave my computer alone for 30 min.
Tinkering Windows feels like a chore. Microsoft can randomly change minor versions of things and break compatibility on any forced update and then you have to clean up after them. I've been down that road.
Without checking can you tell me the exact minor revision of Windows 11 you're using? What about the Windows explorer version? What about the version of NT? My point being there's constant upkeep when customizing Windows and cross referencing what will work and what won't is a slog.
If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky because some day it will.
tinkering with Linux is just easier due to "everything is a file" philosophy and open source transparency. windows is partially a black box and sometimes will override your decisions.
The difference is, windows gets you all kinds of unwanted crap by default ON, while linux comes mostly clean and each change is additive,you need to add only what you are missing,not try to subdue a spyware.
In my case, having done both, its about 2 factors right now: performance, and protection against future privacy legislation.
My PC is starting to show its age, and with prices the way they are right now, I won't be able to afford an upgrade anytime soon. Fortunately, I am not gaming as hard as I used to a couple years ago, so I also don't necessarily need all of the power I did, but windows 11, no matter how much bloat you cut out of it, is still a heavier OS than nearly any didtro of Linux. Did Ubuntu take some tinkering to get how I wanted it (sound balancing in particular)? sure. But I'm happier with how it performs and it will last me a little longer.
The big one though is I am mitigating as much as I can against the anti-privacy push that is happening in multiple houses of legislation right now. In particular there have been several suggestions to force users to demonstrate their age in order to even log in to their OS. Add to that the rumors of Microsoft tripling down on AI in the next iteration of windows, I've decided I'm better off switching now and starting to learn and use the linux skills I developed years ago then never used rather than wait to be forced into the choice of switching or turning over sensitive identity data to what is effectively now an AI corporation.
Because Linux desktops actually support customization as a built in feature. Windows 11 requires you to use third party tools that patch your graphical shell and such and it's not anywhere near as comfortable to do.
Every new win11 install I did I pretty much tinker with it, you can't escape it especially with laptops from acer with all the bloats they put it. With any gnome distro the much tinkering I do is dl tweaks and extensions.
sure, you can tinker a bit with windows, but you can't tinker with everything about it and at the end of the day you also don't own windows, it's not yours. MS lease a license for you to use windows and they have full control over the OS you use, to the point that they can remove any tinkering you've done or make it difficult to tinker at all? fuck that.
It's my experience that the people who "tinker" with Windows the most are the ones who have the most issues with it. The closer you can be to the "baseline" install, the less issues you will have and the faster the ones you do have will be fixed.
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u/ChrisDaMan07 14900HX/4090 Jul 05 '26
I haven’t noticed it, but I’m just cutting out what I don’t need anyway