Live data from Hacker News

Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron

arstechnica.com

111–120 of 169 posts

Re: Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron

#111

Has anyone become so disillusioned with windows that they just have a windows pc sitting around collecting dust? Sometimes I still need to use some legacy program or whatever on there but I feel like the last time I booted into that thing was over a month ago now.

Your system will probably become unusable, because anytime Windows is shut down or disconnected too long, it will immediately crave gobs of updates upon boot, and you may be powerless to stop it.

For that reason, I made sure I rotated through all my VMs about once a month, just spin up and down for no other reason but updating.

Re: Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron

#112

I keep seeing headlines about Microsoft adding adverts to Windows and whatnot but none of it ever appears infront of me. Is that because I'm on Windows Pro?

Hit the Super key Type a letter 'a' Backspace Your AI Powered Copilot. Say goodbye to endless search results! Try the New Bing. NCAA Footaball Set To Return. Ask Bing about NCAA Football. Top Football Tailgating Spots. Ranking The Best College Rivalries. Today's News Weather And More. Trending News From The Web. Djokovic wins W&S Open. Confronted by Contestant. Meme dog Cheems dies. Yankees lose 8 in a row. Dentist G…

Poor Tori

Re: Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron

#113

I got to tell ya, one of the blissful things about using a Chromebook is that they don't pull this shit at all. Sure, Google's an ad company, and the telemetry is taken for granted, but they don't put animated, undeletable shit in the app menu, there's never a popup to remind me I haven't purchased something, or even that some obscure, irrelevant system process died or needs attention. There's no shovelware; how coul…

> I got to tell ya, one of the blissful things about using a Chromebook is that they don't pull this shit at all.

Yet.

Re: Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron

#114

Ugh. I’m OS homeless. Windows is full of garbage. MacOS jumped the shark on UI and is irritating in so many ways as it tries to be some Frankenstein’s monster of a desktop and mobile-inspired UI. And Linux is incapable of watching videos in a browser without destroying my CPU (Nvidia lacks hardware video decoding on Linux) and continues with all the classic “engineers don’t do UX” problems. Not one option feels “good…

What do you mean about the MacOS UI? It sounds like you're talking about Stage Manager (which I love but understand not liking) but it should be disabled by default.

Mobile inspired UI includes Catalyst apps, System Settings, Control Center, narrow dialogs with centered text and buttons, all icons the same shape, title bars gone.

Re: Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron

#115
post #6

The modern iteration of the Start menu is a particular travesty and has been rendered all but unusable in order to push you to Bing by accident. Microsoft simply must believe that Windows can survive the users hating this crap, and I fear they are right. For myself 11 was bad enough to finally try out Steam on Debian and was pleasantly surprised. KDE is closer to being the Windows desktop I want than Windows 11 is, w…

Best of both worlds in a good window laptop with Windows 10 with no bloatware :). I purposely reinstalled windows 10 after upgrading to windows 11 due to all this intrusive bloatware

Re: Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron

#117
post #5

Phew. After being a Windows user for literally almost two decades I've happily migrated to Linux and couldn't be happier. Yep, it took some time to prepare but let's be frank, developers already use quite a lot of Linux/Unix tools already so why not cut the middleman and just work directly with what we need most?

how do you deal with absence of working task manager? any random hang-up is a forced restart, no way to kill offending process as EVERYTHING just freezes up. Tried forcing myself to migrate to Linux, even after forcing no updates, a lot of things magically stop working or break, forcing me to spend hours on google to fix some crap by copypasting random nonsense into terminal. I just want to use my PC, not be a debugg…

If things are so frozen that you can't open System Monitor (task manager), try this: Hold down SysRq and Alt, let go of SysRq, keep holding down Alt, then press these buttons in order (don't need to hold them): REISUB - to remember it: "Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring", also known as "raising the elephant".

On some systems you need to enable this feature first, so try it out once to see if it works and look up how to enable it, if it doesn't.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

On most distros, you can also get into a command line, with the combination CTRL + ALT + F1 - F8 (try out which function keys do it for you and how to get back to the GUI). There you can use `ps`, `kill `, `reboot now` or restart the GUI. I'd keep a note of the exact commands on my phone just in case.

As a sidenote, I've had an issue on a good windows desktop PC where it freezes when watching YouTube or ither streaming services. I can still move the mouse for a bit, but clicking does nothing and I'm unable to even save it from a hard reset with Ctrl + Alt + Delete. Sometimes it won't happen for weeks, but if I'm unlucky multiple times in an hour. Look up "PC freezes while watching YouTube" and you will see I'm far from alone with this issue, Asus motherboards with new AMD processors seem to be the common factor. Haven't had this happen on Linux yet (dual boot) and I've tried everything to avoid these unusual freezes in windows, but nothing seems to help.

Re: Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron

#118

I'm a lifetime computer user and software engineer with a half bricked laptop caused by Windows 11. Windows wanted me to create a Microsoft account and somehow me not doing that resulted in a boot loop. I installed Linux on it and work around the Windows partition. I did lose a lot of data that's technically accessible, but too lazy.

You can extract your data from the Windows partition and then delete it entirely from the Linux side.

Right, but I bought it for gaming on Windows. Since then the games I want have been released on MacOS, so the use case no longer exists. Now I have an expensive gaming laptop in a box somewhere.

Re: Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron

#119
post #5

Phew. After being a Windows user for literally almost two decades I've happily migrated to Linux and couldn't be happier. Yep, it took some time to prepare but let's be frank, developers already use quite a lot of Linux/Unix tools already so why not cut the middleman and just work directly with what we need most?

how do you deal with absence of working task manager? any random hang-up is a forced restart, no way to kill offending process as EVERYTHING just freezes up. Tried forcing myself to migrate to Linux, even after forcing no updates, a lot of things magically stop working or break, forcing me to spend hours on google to fix some crap by copypasting random nonsense into terminal. I just want to use my PC, not be a debugg…

[deleted]

Re: Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron

#120
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how do you deal with absence of working task manager? I see people offering nice advice here but I mostly do ps aux | grep thing and then kill (-9) it... or killall :) > any random hang-up is a forced restart, no way to kill offending process as EVERYTHING just freezes up. I had the everything freeze up experience initially on a Dell laptop and frankly don't know what was the cause. Maybe missing microcode updates…

I know how to use ps or top. what to do when you cannot launch terminal even?

Counter-intuitively my usual go-to is to SSH in from another device (phone, tablet, another computer). 95% of the time when the UI is locked up the ssh daemon is still responsive.

Note: I also do this on macOS but it’s much less useful since there are very few commands to actually restore a session that’s locked up.

Post reply on HN