*Corporate surveillance.
The only part of windows that really matters in the long run is win32 which has been extremely stable. You could go back to XP and not lose that many features. The fact that modern windows runs like ass has very little to do with backwards compatibility.
Every feature they listed was some anti-consumer thing that only a corporate customer would ever care about or want. Every single one.
What I learned is that Windows 11 is great for the customer, I'm just not the customer. I'm just the dummy who paid for it.
- Secure Boot enforcement
- Microsoft account requirement
- BitLocker device encryption tied to MS account
- Hardware attestation
- Telemetry/Data Collection
- Extensive diagnostic data collection
- Advertising ID tracking
- Activity history syncing
- Bing integration everywhere
- Edge as persistent default (difficult to change) - OneDrive integration/nagging
- Microsoft 365 upselling
- Copilot integration
- Widgets panel with MSN content
- Start menu web search forcing Bing
- Centered taskbar (not moveable)
- Simplified right-click menu (hiding options)
- Removed taskbar features (no drag-to-taskbar, no ungrouping)
- Start menu ads/recommendations Update Control
- Forced automatic updates
- Limited update deferral for Home users
- Feature updates bundled with security updates
- Device Management (Enterprise)
- Intune/MDM integration
- Windows Autopilot
- Azure AD requirements
- Remote wipe capabilities
- Monetization
- Ads in Start menu
- Ads in File Explorer
- Suggested apps
- Pre-installed third-party apps (Candy Crush, etc.)
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
It persists across updates, can be customized with extremely granular control over what is removed/re-enabled, or using the default mode which works fantastically for most users with minimal risk of disabling something many people might prefer to keep (e.g Xbox app).
I’ve been using it for years on every machine/VM with Windows 11 installed. The OS gets out of my way completely both in terms of functionality and distractions like ads.
I cannot recommend it enough, I am eternally grateful to the maintainers for making Windows 11 feel like a modernized Windows 7 experience.
>- BitLocker device encryption tied to MS account
Unless something changed with 11, this is opt in, with a specific "save to your microsoft account option". I really don't see the issue here.
>- Hardware attestation
This is either a rehash of the "TPM 2.0 requirement" point above, or just outright false.
>- Telemetry/Data Collection
>- Extensive diagnostic data collection
This are the same thing restated
>- Forced automatic updates
>- Limited update deferral for Home users
Again, these are just the same thing.
>- Feature updates bundled with security updates
That's basically... every commercial OS out there? Good luck getting security updates on android (if your OEM even provides it) if you're not on the latest version. Some linux distros even have it as a selling point, aka. rolling release.
>- Device Management (Enterprise)
>- Intune/MDM integration
These are the same thing AND you have to jump through hoops to enable it. I really don't see the issue here.
>- Copilot integration
>- Windows Autopilot
You can just... not use it?
>- Azure AD requirements
???
Is this just restating the microsoft account requirement?
>Monetization
This is a restatement for half the other points.
>- Start menu ads/recommendations Update Control
>- Ads in Start menu
>- Suggested apps
>- Pre-installed third-party apps (Candy Crush, etc.)
All stating the same thing.
The oldest, worst, and most over-used trick in the (windows) book.
Forcing saving to OneDrive causes this issue a lot too. I was stunned to find that saving changes to an existing document will often try to save a new file in OneDrive instead. So if you don't notice this and go back to your original file, it will look like your changes weren't saved.
I recently installed CachyOS on a USB NVMe drive, so I can dual boot without the dual boot pain. And wow, that thing flies.
I've been a Windows user since 3.0, but Windows 11 is probably getting replaced soon. I've stopped competitive gaming so anti-cheats ain't an issue, and Linux gaming is good enough.
There are some things I'll miss, but the bloat and lack of care from MS I'll be glad to leave behind.
probably won't be disconnected... been using such a cd key for months w/o issue and my win11 experience isn't that painful
To stoke my rage into an incandescent fury, if you go to settings -> Lock Screen, there's no obvious way to disable it at first. You have to change the background image from "Microsoft Spotlight", the one where the image changes to a static background image, and THEN you get a checkbox. The checkbox you uncheck is "get tips, fun facts, and more". I guess trying to sell me shit is under "more".
It sucks because i agree that having the picture change is a nice feature. Microsoft has decided to hold that nice feature hostage to ads.
It's not great. Linux mint is what I install for older relatives now. It's close enough to windows feeling that they never even question it.
There’s plenty of that content in our media, but those people don’t consume that media. A computer is a critical general purpose tool. Everyone needs it. This is like putting scantily clad elves on every refrigerator.
On a more serious note, I really only use Windows for games & I'm still always frustrated with how many updates (& restarts during updates) Windows needs. My fans are always constantly spinning on Windows too (laptop or desktop) whereas my Mac & Linux machines are generally silent outside of heavy load.
And it's not that i don't like windows, it is just too damn slow for me.
And no. I do not want to upgrade my gear every 2 years or so
I miss the ~mid Windows 7 era. Not that everything ran perfectly without issues on Windows 7 at the time, particularly old games, but at least there was an option good enough to assume to always go with first instead of "see if the games you play work best here".
It's always hardcore multiplayer games with the actual crowd. Using linux for gaming is a great way to continue down the path to becoming a recluse.
I prefer the comfort of knowing them, and usually do it in the old basement LAN party way.
In my young time we didn't have internet, and we were actually LESS recluse overall ;-)
defender seemingly needs to check every 10ms that you still don't have a virus
A friend of mine complained that he hated how Firefox "always" wants to restart with an update. I couldn't understand what he was on about. Turned out I use Firefox daily and he uses it like once every 2 months to test something and yeah, Firefox has an update out every 2 months or so, so that fits.
It's the same with Windows (and, I assume, macOS). Use Windows more and the updater will disappear out of sight.
Side effect unfortunately is that they are shoving ad- and bloatware down your throat through these updates.
But that is, because Microsoft does not care about the end user at all. It's not the fault of auto-updates.
Windows still reboots instead of shut down when you do update and shut down.
Those beholden to MSO and the One True Excel, which of course is not guaranteed to work well (or at all) under Wine / Proton, are less lucky.
Not so fast, the u there means ultrabook. Crammed into a too small chassis, this thing chokes even when using Edge or Chrome to work on Jira.
Windows 11 JS Web Start menu does not help...
Windows 11 is "fine" on my powerful desktop gaming CPU, but that is just brute-forcing it.
It was CRAZY fast, over Teamviewer it felt better and faster than my local machine... Sad times.
But it has since then stalled and got increasingly worse. Especially with this AI shoving everywhere, not even mentioning getting ads at some point in notifications and start menu.
I'm not particularly in love with MacOS either (but have no realistic alternative on my MacBooks).
I'm more and more inclined of switching my desktop (my main working machine) to Omarchy, two coworkers in my team use it and love it and seems the sweet spot for what I need as a dev without the annoyance of Windows or the god awful macos.
A lot of Windows' current problems can be traced back to the Ballmer era, including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF, and god knows what else. This has lead to the current chaotic and disjointed UI experience, and served to confuse and drive away developers. Repeatedly sacrificing reliable and consistent UX while chasing shiny and new technologies is no way to run an OS.
Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism.
Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.
Gone.
32-bit apps?
Gone.
PowerPC stuff? Anything more than a few years old?
Forget it.
You can't even run versions of iPhoto or iTunes after they deliberately broke them and replaced them with objectively shittier equivalents. Their own apps!
Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified. There are VB6 apps from 1998 talking to Access databases still running small businesses today.
Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux.
It's not really a problem for Apple because their userbase is content to re-buy all their software every 5 years.
I was thinking more about the developer perspective, i.e. churn in terms of frameworks. Yes, PowerPC is gone. Intel will be gone soon.
But both the transitions from PowerPC to Intel as well as from Intel to ARM were pretty straightforward for developers if you were using Cocoa and not doing any assembly stuff.
Carbon only every was a bandaid to give devs some time for the transition to Cocoa.
Imagine taking your car in for an oil change annually and the radio stopped working when you got it back. It's incompatible with the new oil, they say. You'd be furious.
With the Windows of yore this wasn't so much of an issue — with 5-10 years between upgrade cycles — and service packs in between — you could space it out.
When you work in the computer industry, there tends to be a disconnect with how they are used in the real world by real people — as tools. People grow accustomed to their tools and expect them to be reliable as opposed to some ephemeral service.
The Core 2 Duo, used in the last 32 bit Mac, was released in 2006.
> PowerPC stuff?
The last G5 PowerPCs were, similarly, discontinued in 2006.
> every 5 years.
20?
The more relevant test is the reverse: running Windows XP and apps of that era on modern hardware. It will work perfectly. The same cannot be said of 2000-era Mac software.
From my own experience things tend to keep working on Linux if you package your own userland libraries instead of depending on the ever changing system libraries. More or less how you would do it on Windows.
Except Windows isn't perfect either, I had to deal with countless programs that required an ancient version of the c runtime, some weird database libraries that weren't installed by default and countless other Microsoft dependencies that somehow weren't part of the ever growing bloat.
Did _you_ tried ? Because i hear this mantra a lot on HN, but my experience is different. MDK ( the game) cannot _run_ on a current Windows.
Old, complex games are the worst-case scenario, and are the exception, not the rule. Since they were only beginning to figure out hardware-accelerated 3D gaming in the 90s, it meant that we were left with lots of janky implementations and outdated graphics APIs that were quickly forgotten about. Though, MDK doesn't seem to suffer from this - it should be capable of running on newer systems directly [1]. One big issue it does have is that it uses a 16-bit installer, which is one thing that was explicitly retired during the transition to 64-bit due to it being so archaic at that moment, only being relevant to Windows 1-3. But you can still install the game using the method described in the article, and it should hopefully run fine from there on. Since it has options to use a software renderer and old DirectX, at least one of these should work.
Under GNU/Linux, the VB6 counterpart would be TCL/Tk+SQlite, which would run nearly the same over almost 25-30 years.
As a plus, I can run my code with any editor and the TCL/Tk dependencies will straightly run on both XP, Mac, BSD and GNU/Linux with no propietary chains ever, or worse, that Visual Studio monstruosity. A simple editor will suffice and IronTCL weights less than 100MB and that even bundled with some tool, as BFG:
https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG
IronTCL:
https://www.irontcl.com/index.html
Good luck finding some VB5/6 runtime libraries out there without being a virii nest.
I'm not going to descend into a "my OS's API is worse than yours" pissing match with you, because it's pointless and tangential. The issue is not "is the Windows framework situation worse than Linux" but rather "is the Windows framework situation worse than it used to be" and the answer is emphatically yes, and due mostly to Ballmer's obsession with chasing shiny things, such as that brief period when he decided that all Windows must look like a phone.
Xlib and Motif are stable APIs. Qt and ... GTK on the other hand...
Qt is now the best "old school" UI framework by far.
July 2014: Microsoft lays off 14k people, a large portion of which are SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test)/QA/test people.
The idea was that regular developers themselves would be writing and owning tests rather than relying on separate testers.
I'm sure there were multiple instances of insane empire building and lots of unproductivity, but it's also hard to not think this was where the downfall began.
He has failed to correctly incentivize/hire/motivate/plan/structure/etc.
And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.
I don’t use it anymore. Fortunately since my windows usage is restricted only to work and I have an ultra wide monitor, I’m able to pin all the apps I need on the taskbar. With the Win + # shortcuts I can avoid the start menu completely.
In the past I didn’t use the taskbar at all and depended on Win + search entirely.
Something like 90% of all new devs today learn only cloud-native backend dev or web frontend dev. The only exceptions tends to be mobile and game developers. Collectively cloud+web, mobile, and games account for like 98% of all new devs it seems. Nobody learns anything else.
The web is going to become the desktop UI in the future for this reason alone. It's going to be slower and much more bloated than almost any other alternative, but it's got the critical mass of adoption behind it and that's what determines core technologies in the industry. Technical merit is a distant second or third.
This is frustrating but it's not surprising to one who has studied biology and evolution. In evolution this is called "path dependence," and it's why we have weird things like a man's testicles hanging in a bag below his body. A previous evolutionary path optimized the sperm production process to run at a lower temperature than the rest of the body, so then evolution's hack for this is to put them in a bag outside the body. Ticket closed with "resolved." The pathways taken through a complex solution space determine the outcome and the outcome is often bizarre and "hacky" for this reason. The key is that it's very hard to back-track. Once a path has been taken, it's very hard to un-take it.
Large industries and markets are essentially "biological," not rationally designed, so you get the same kinds of phenomena.
It could be much worse. If Linux+HTML+JS had not taken over, we might have the Microsoft Enterprise Web(tm) where Visual Basic (not VB.NET, OG Visual Basic) is the main language and each service or site would require an NT license for every node and an IIS license for every web hostname. UIs might be written in ActiveX or desktop ones in Microsoft C/C++ with OLE and similar horrors. It might be just as slow and infinitely uglier and more expensive and less open. Apple would be dead and open source would much more marginalized than it is today. The net would basically be a total MS monopoly. If you didn't live through the 90s: this nearly happened.
Make it a web app and your cheap entry level grads can do it.
If a PM needs NotepadAI for their career progression then start it from scratch.
That's why they got the job, didn't they ? /s
It was no biggie, just joining the low level of C with the class notions from Java. Pair that with the C++FAQ website, and it was easy.
Are entry-level devs generally not able to do that nowadays? I do not believe people are generally more stupid or less capable, so, is education so much worse or what's going on?
As far as I remember, Notepad was the reference implementation for a Microsoft widget. Nothing more. If "modern entry-mid level devs can't do that" you really have a much bigger problem.
This ... has been very opposite of my experience:
1) I've seen websites turn into poor imitations of mobile apps that lose all the features of web UIs that I want: ability to open links in tabs, use of affordances to scroll up and down, dense packing of information, ability to edit the size, etc. (Edit: almost forgot how they run the back button too!)
2) Generally, I see that the more UI specialists they have, the worse the UI gets. There's the saying, "developers are responsible for mediocre UIs, designers are responsible for horrible UIs".
Funny. Back in the 90s Microsoft just hired kind of random kids from college to write their OS in C.
Sure some push for web-based solution has moved a lot of people away from desktop applications, but even before that Microsoft muddied the waters of native UI development.
Moving from User32.dll and GDI to GPU based rendering with WPF, might not have been the worst idea - and WPF is still going strong - but it's a clear cut, leaving old apps un-upgradable. So if companies need to eventually rewrite it, will they stick with desktop apps or move to "web apps"?
Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't stop there, but we've since seen a bunch of different attempts at new Windows UI libs to the point, where nobody trusts Microsoft anymore (remember Silverlight?) and everyone else is left confused by the chaos of an ecosystem.
Yeah, it's a wonder they were able to do it so many years (ftom win 1.0 to Win 8).
> it's hard to hire native UI developers
This is the pool of mobile devs. If Microsoft is unwilling to eat the lead time (measured in weeks) for an existing native mobile dev to become productive on their stack, that's a sign of much bigger organizational problems.
You pushed ActiveX on the web, and viceversa with IE4 and Windows98. Now, the web turd came back with Electron. If any, thanks Microsoft for that.
Hah, I guess the Internet really is like a sewer, you have to have good protective equipment to wade in it...
I'm sure there are issues (particularly around binary blob drivers) but they seem surmountable given enough effort...
And to think on all "modern" OSes you can't even do that. Neither Android nor IOS let you do this in any way shape or form. Even with portable webapps it doesn't work, as webapps go offline. And microsoft clearly wants to create this situation too (last brute force attempt was windows home)
you can also "add to homescreen" on iOS/android and it acts like a native app & works offline. symbolic math - computer algebra system, integration/differentiation, finance app in rom, 3d graphs.
(emu is not my work, i only packaged it for PWA and host it for myself to use, but you are welcome to as well)
no 82. I only liked the ti-89
Recently I was helping a relative do something on their Windows 11 machine and I asked them to press Windows key + R, type calc, press Enter. And I was astonished at the result. Literally: Mouth agape, frozen in astonishment for about 10 seconds.
I knew about the ads and tracking and the local account bullshit, but I didn't realize just how bad the Windows experience has become.
I decided in the end it was pulling down stuff from the web - in tiles it displayed beside the start menu. If you were on a fast network and had a good internet connection the problem mostly went away. The feature was inherited from WinPhone, I think. So it wasn't that the underling OS or video had got slower, it was them bolting on irrelevant crap to the menu. I later got smarter and deleted all the tiles, so only the menu was displayed. That improved things considerably. I remain gob smacked at them crippling their product like that.
I'm try to avoid Windows now, and am mostly successful. But I read these stories about them adding AI and ads into the mix. If they bolted them into basic window functions like the start menu in the same idiotic way, I could well believe Microsoft has release the slowest Windows ever despite it running on the fastest hardware the planet has seen.
What happens is the calculator window pops up ~immediately, but the entire contents of the window are a stupid logo--for at least 5 full seconds--until the UI elements actually load and you can actually use the calculator to calculate things.
The most basic thing our PCs do is they calculate. The Intel 4004 was designed... for a calculator. calc.exe, that erstwhile snappy, lightweight native Win32 application is now apparently some Electron abomination with a footprint the size of Windows 98 and a launch time to match.
The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.
It obviously knows what I'm trying to do (Bing search recommendation is for "Add or Remove Programs"), yet refuses to surface the actual shortcut to that settings page (or "app", or whatever Microsoft calls it this week). Even better: some days it pops up immediately after typing "Add" and other days I'm wrestling with it like I'm training a stubborn animal, clicking the result in the hope that the OS will "learn" that yes, this is what I want when I type "Add".
Most of the time I just give up and dig through the Settings menu like it's 1999.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...
UWP is actually faster, yes that is that bad.
New Notepad in 11, with tabs and autosave (and dark mode), is so much better and more practical to use over old one, it just stays open all the time and become my main notetaking pick. It may take a beat to open a big file (1+ mb) with line wrapping, but it's pretty much just as fast as anything (and may be even faster than some other editors). It's just very easy to reach for and quite snappy.
There are some apps on Windows with actual gripes, but Notepad, Paint, Snipping tool, they're quite solid and have become everyday tools that eliminated the need to reach for some other third party apps.
Maybe they fixed it, maybe they haven't. I both turned off formatting and am using vscode for notes now.
The kind of developers who are willing to work with native GUI APIs (even though a framework) simply don't exist in enough quantity anymore.
Never heard of it and the website and GitHub repo sure aren't doing a great job of describing it's benefits.
"Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated" are vague and really aren't adjectives I'd be looking for in an OS.
People have been flocking to it for reasons like
1. They don't want to configure hyprland themselves.
2. They want to say they are running an "elite" distro like Arch.
3. They're part of DHH's weird following that is a mix of insufferable smugness and right-wing politics.
However, I found Omarchy to be whatever the opposite of a sweet spot is. It brings all the complications of a tiling WM, so you still have to learn a complicated new way of using your system, but at the same time it is extremely opinionated so instead of ending with a tailored custom tiling WM that suits your needs at the end of the learning curve, you end up with a tiling WM that is suited for someone else’s needs.
On the flip side, the simplifications it does add, such as a supposedly easier way to add packages, does no such thing. It doesn’t simplify the process at all and in fact makes it harder to understand how to actually remove stuff.
I find Omarchy to simply "make sense" out of the box for me. And, I've never used a tiling WM before it (and feel crazy for not having done so)
I have used a tiling WM before.
So I wonder whether the benefits you’re seeing in Omarchy are simply the result of using a tiling WM for the first time, which overrode what I believe Omarchy detracted from a general tiling WM.
Or whether my poorer experience was a result of the fact that having used a tiling WM I was more comfortable customizing and so found the Omarchy opinionated behavior restrictive or if the benefits Omarchy brings to someone who’s new to a tiling WM are lost on me.
Surely there's a typo there, and you meant late 2000s, e.g. 2009?
Late 2010s Windows was W10 with constant system-breaking bugs, mobile-first interface, more and more data mining and adware my MS, etc.
Definitely moving in the direction of "what is good for a particular PM" and not "what is good for the user." I would have switched to linux years ago if it were not for the great hardware and I like having access to iMessages from the desktop.
IOS 26 is also terrible (on battery especially). New OS releases always have a ton of new services in them that bog them down.
A lot of this slowdown is just developers getting complacent and getting used to the new hardware capabilities. Windows has a lot of low hanging optimization fruit laying around. It's just Microsoft doesn't really care about that: it doesn't fit the business model at all.
That said, I was restoring a notebook owned by my aunt recently and I decided to run Ubuntu on it so I could mess with gparted a little bit. I'm already a full-time Linux user (have been for about five years now, I guess), but I was still surprised to see that one of the most bloated Linux distributions ran lightning fast on my aunt's Pentium Gold + 4gb RAM + HDD while Windows took over four minutes to boot.
It's absolutely time to abandon Windows if you're still dependent on it. There are alternatives. Heck, I'm not a fan of Apple either but at this point I'd recommend a MacBook for anyone wanting to get away from Windows and not comfortable with Linux or a Chromebook.
But then I don’t find macOS to be slow or a buggy mess, so mileage may vary.
It's so buggy on 26, it drives me crazy. Just not nearly as crazy as Windows 11 drives me.
I haven't had stability issues with any Office program in years, but everything you mentioned is moot because there are Office features (especially Power___ features in Excel) that don't have parity on MacOS. If I get a workbook from a client, I need it to run exactly the same on my machine as it does on theirs.
Besides that no problems with MacOS, it feels snappy to me and Office apps work mostly fine (except for all the missing features Microsoft refuses to add to Outlook).
Wayland per-monitor fractional scaling is delightful and after a couple gsettings tweaks restoring minimize/bottom dock I’ve been loving the polish and snappiness of Gnome. I also had to switch the WiFi backend from wpa_supplicant to iwn due to connection problems on one specific WiFi network but now it’s totally stable.
macOS multi-monitor support and scaling is a constant thorn in my side that was marginally improved by paying for Better Display. Windows 11 really is the most solid option for various monitor combinations not in Apple's happy path of resolutions/sizes.
But I don’t really like the ergonomics of using even clean de-bloated Windows as my main dev machine, so was very pleased to have such a great out-of-the-box experience trying Fedora for the first time.
Im generally a microsoft shill, but theyre really on the down hill slope. windows 11 is truly a masterpiece of changes no one asked for or wants, Teams is the least reliable piece of business software I've ever seen. New outlook does not have feature parity with old outlook and has the same bargain bin apple ux stylings as w11.
Maybe ive finally crested the age gap and im officially a dinosaur, but God damn every microsoft product is worse than it used to be.
They’re toast without them.
- dell p2 300 win95
- early core duo era with linux 2.4 (some kali linux image)
and saying this as a fan of recent linux kernel and systemd parallelism with the crazy cpu over ssd speed.. i was utterly surprised
And I've seen that.
Sometimes, I click on the windows button and it legit takes 3-4 seconds for windows to render the start menu that only has the program list, nothing else, just the list of programs.
These machines with their 6/8 or so cores can do tasks at the scale of nanoseconds and it takes, 3 whole seconds to render a single window with a list of program names, that’s simply stupid.
Anyone who has ever touched a windows xp machine knows that the start menu can complete drawing before my brain can register that my fingers in fact touched the keys, which takes roughly 20ms or so if I remember correctly. What the hell is this system doing?
The only care about AI so that’s what we’re gonna get.
"Windows 11 is running on unsupported hardware"
I've been using W10 and W11 Pro versions daily and I don't feel any difference except task bar search menu performance (especially this on corpo laptop, on PC this is fine)
I still haven't used Windows since Win 10 support ended, and have no idea how bad Windows 11 is for people to declare Win 10 "super fast" all over the internet. But I don't have any hope it will accept any setup I want. Win 10 already didn't.
That being said, W10 (or W11 for that matter) will never be as fast a Win 7 was on an SSD in the 2010-2020 era, even with all the hacks and debloat scripts available in many places on the Internet.
- https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat (recommended elsewhere in this thread)
- https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ (I used this one a couple weeks ago, seems to work well)
But seriously though, learn to fish. The answers aren't hard to find if you look, know what to search for, and are at least somewhat discriminating in your investigation.
I run Win 11 on an old tiny NUC PC that has Windows 10 before - now it does seem faster, is very stable and is not so annoying.
One thing: AFAIK you need to have the Windows 11 Pro version for the best de-bloating results.
Do it all manually if for no other reason than you know all the changes you made and know where all the different settings actually are.
For the record I am also with you that using WinDebloat is not the best way for the simplest reason that it all seems arbitrary.
I simply stayed on Windows 10 and I don’t seem to miss any feature thus far lol
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/update-to-disable-...
I just want an OS that helps me control my computers and be productive, not one that "mines" me to sell me to be exploited.
While I have been using various Linux flavors for my servers, my desktop has been Windows for decades. Microsoft's charade with Win11 has me committed to moving to desktop Linux in 2026. There will be pain, but they crossed a line.
Obviously all these security features cost performance and something that linux and macos can live without since they generally do not have closed source drivers that can't be fixed (except nvidia, but it seems to be changing as nvidia is giving up and starting to open up due to AI). Windows has to be proactive and that is one of the biggest performance hurdles it faces. It's actually incredible how comparatively safe windows is if you have all the security features enabled, there are obviously still one-offs due to having to maintain compatibility and what was effectively usermode code ported to kernelmode ruining it, thankfully that also seems to be changing since they're slowly rewriting it to be secure by design with Unstrusted<> guards making these issues significantly less common.
as for apple doesn't have third party code in the kernel at all so they can also fix it themselves.
side note, the restrictive linux license might seem like it is preventing adoption since for example the whole HDMI 2.1 spec is centered around proprietary code, but in reality they have this illusion that their 'proprietary' code can be protected and somehow linux undermines it when in reality people can reverse everything to sourcecode if they spend enough time on it - if anyone is curious you can just take one of the firmware dumps from any hdmi 2.1 capable TV dongle, extract the kernel module responsible handling the authentication for hdmi 2.1, extract the code, put it in your amdgpu opensource driver, now you have hdmi 2.1 on linux.
That said, my favourite Windows computer ever was the Fujitsu Stylistic ST4110 w/ transflective display and Wacom EMR digitizer --- put an SSD in it, carried a couple of spare batteries, added a USB GPS, and kept a pair of docking stations w/ power supplies at my desks at work and the office and a third power supply in my laptop bag and it just worked --- despair of really replacing it, the Samsung Galaxy Book 12 was close, but then Fall Creators Update came out and crippled styluses down to an 11th touch input so that they would scroll rather than select text... getting by w/ a Book 3 Pro 360, but Windows 11 has me looking at a Raspberry Pi paired w/ a Wacom One or Movink display....
I was surprised the other day when I used a W11 machine that the new context menu took a perceptible second to appear and it still didn't have everything the old had so you still have to call the old one, very dismaying.
The UI switch is not particularly obvious, at Control Panel → Hardware and Sound → Power Options → System Settings
You can get even more of your hard drive back by limiting the size of Windows' page file.
I'm actually a big fan of hibernation on laptops and have mine set to suspend for 5 minutes then hibernate. My real life usage battery life has been noticeably longer with this setup.
The damn thing was shockingly performant. We have been played for absolute fools.
So I went back to Microsoft's own RDP client - they deprecated it and now only support the new Windows App but you need to login with your corporate email and it does not even support RDP but Azure !!!!.
You need to go to the stone age and use the RDP client they shipped with Windows NT 4.0.
Say what you want about Balmer but Satya is now worse - he needs to go.
Someone please tell me if there’s a trick to making the Windows snipping tool faster. I press Win+Shift+S to activate the tool for capturing a region. It takes about 2 seconds to load. I draw the rectangle. Then it takes about 2 seconds to finish capturing.
That is 4 infuriating seconds for something that should be (and I’m sure used to be!) virtually instant.
Now that text is easily recognized in images, screenshots are an important interoperability tool for garbage apps like Teams.
I am not associated with this software, just a very happy user. You get a lifetime license for $20, it's constantly updated with new features, and is a joy to use.
Note that even though WinRT is largely written in C++, and the team brags about performance, due to the amount of COM/WinRT reference counting and the sandboxing model of application identity, it actually runs slower than .NET applications.
Quite ironic, given the Windows team sabotaged on Longhorn.
For a fair test against Windows 10 and below, you'll have at least to do this: "Temporarily turn off your Memory Integrity and VMP" -- https://support.microsoft.com/en-US
Also, it's important to have all bits and pieces of Hyper-V/Windows Virtual Platform off (which the Menory Integrity relies on), thus cutting off WSL functionality.
We don't need flawed tests to tell us Windows 11 sucks -- yesterday my explorer bar didn't respond to clicks nor Windows key. In the past killing explorer.exe and restarting it, or logging off and back on, worked. Yesterday I had to reboot the machine to fix it.
Why is it, when ever someone points out that Microsoft shits the bed on something someone will come out with ludicrous ideas about changing the default environment.
The default environment is what you get, all this handwringing about whats potentially possible misses the point entirely; for decades we have, as a community, scoffed at linux for requiring you to understand deeply how your OS works in order for it to function. Now we’re in the situation where the out-of-the-box experience for gaming requires less esoteric knowledge on Linux than Windows, yet people defend Windows still.
Do you seriously think the exec running emails even knows what Hyper-V is? Do you think any IT department is going to disable memory integrity?
Would any Dev disable WSL? Do the vast majority of gamers want to do this? Should they have to?
You’re now arguing that overhead is ok because its mitigated by newer hardware, I don’t believe that to be true as I run W11 on A Threadripper 3970x and an i9-14900k and the fuckers feel leagues slower than my M1 Macbook, its a joke! Like 10x the power/thermal envelope- and sure, some of that is down to the M1 being great, but there’s no benchmark putting it above those CPUs.
Stop pretending that this is ok, and stop trying to spread uncertainty about a valid test.
I’d prefer newer hardware too, but this is the compromise if we want older OS’s to be included.
I love Windows 11, and have zero complaints.
Win+R is instant.
Notepad is the best version so far, I use it as a todo list and it saves and loads in the same place on my third screen every reboot - fantastic.
I have no use for the AI being shoehorned into everything, but I use it every day via chatgpt in the browser, and genie and cp in vsc.
Now you might say modern software needs modern hardware, but Windows as it is is stagnant in terms of functionality and features, so what justifies the requirement of newer hardware?
I keep a Windows virtual machine for software that doesn't run on Linux but my use of that over the years has declined dramatically.
To me, the earlier versions of Windows 10 were somewhat OK when they're stripped down. But Windows 11 is bloated beyond belief. And shoving AI functionality in it is going to make things worse.
the__alchemist•13h ago
roomey•13h ago
1-6•13h ago
What is Microsoft trying to do by ending Windows 10 support?
the__alchemist•13h ago
zamadatix•13h ago
I've run many machines this way without issue yet, but it's not officially supported. I'm hoping Microsoft will really just make "Windows 12" or something if they ever decide to make these true hard requirements to load at all instead of just be supported.
mixel•13h ago
the__alchemist•13h ago
Rygian•13h ago
Also, you seem to skip other notable changes like enforced spam and enforced Copilot and enforced online registration.
the__alchemist•13h ago
1over137•13h ago
doodlesdev•12h ago
snowram•13h ago
layer8•12h ago
anal_reactor•12h ago