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

arstechnica.com

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

#131

Post by vxNsr »

evaporating wrote: post #115
fidotron wrote: 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

My company keeps trying to force me onto W11. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve marked my connection as “limited” so it won’t download any updates and outlook asks me if I still want to connect even though I’m on a slow connection. Only way to prevent that virus from infecting my work machine. I tried it twice and rolled back twice after less than an hour.

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

#132

Post by Simulacra »

Not by choice, I was given a new laptop from HP that required signing into a Microsoft account before the computer would continue its initial setup. I to create a throwaway account just to access the computer my office paid for. That and the cloud-basing of all software (can you even get office for desktop anymore?) and increasingly, it seems like the management of software is taken out of the hands of the user.

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

#133

Post by Simulacra »

hardware2win wrote: post #40
fidotron wrote: 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…

I agree Start menu is slow as shit I have w11 at work and w10 at home and i see the diff

You might enjoy Classic Shell Start Menu.

http://www.classicshell.net/

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

#134

Post by gumballindie »

nateb2022 wrote: post #23
gumballindie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I made the switch from MacOS and couldn't be happier. The fun thing is that with Linux these days you have the option of a powerful workstation that you can upgrade be it laptop or desktop, can do gaming, and is private. The next thing for me is to "decloud" - meaning remove any and all online services that are not mission critical.

> The next thing for me is to "decloud" - meaning remove any and all online services that are not mission critical. These are often useful, so the better option is to host your own privacy-respecting versions of these tools.

I should have phrased it better, indeed what I meant is self hosting by "declouding" from public clouds. My only concern is realiable self hosted backups. But I already have my own setup for newsfeeds, document storage, even for calling friends and relatives, and at the fraction of the cost (I factor in the value of my privacy as part of overall cost). I think there is good potential for self hosted products out there. A major pain point though is self hosting emails, since that requires a lot of work around spam protection and availability.

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

#135

Post by mikedelago »

Waterluvian wrote: post #107
dawidpotocki wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nvidia lacks hardware video decoding on Linux That's… not true. Fact, they don't support VA-API, but there is support for some other methods like NVDEC. Programs like mpv can use it directly while for something like Firefox you can use a wrapper like nvidia-vaapi-driver[1]. It's not ideal, but that's what you get from buying their stuff. [1] https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver

So 1. I'm using the wrong hardware. It's my fault. 2. I'm using the wrong browser. 3. I should be working out the dependency story and compiling some driver from Github myself. It's 2023. For me that means my OS cannot hardware decode video. It's just not a real option for maybe 99% of PC users.

I don't think it's your fault and I don't think you're using the wrong browser.

> I should be working out the dependency story and compiling some driver from Github myself.

no, nvidia _should_ make it easier for people using the 3rd most popular desktop OS to use their hardware. It would make them more competitive against AMD and Intel, which both support hardware video decoding.

That's probably not going to happen, so the next best option is to install a package from the package manager [0]. There might be some kind of compilation needed, but in my experience that's rarely an issue (aside from time), especially if it's coming out of the package manager for a popular distribution.

> It's just not a real option for maybe 99% of PC users.

well, 99% of PC users with Nvidia hardware. It's an important distinction since this problem is specific to Nvidia. If the solution is to installing a package from the package manager, it's only as difficult as installing the browser in the first place.

I do agree there's some extra questions that may make things difficult, or unfamiliar for the vast majority of people, though. Like how is someone supposed to know they need the nvidia-vaapi-driver package anyway?

[0] - https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver#package-manag...

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

#136

Post by gumballindie »

trustingtrust wrote: post #55
gumballindie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I made the switch from MacOS and couldn't be happier. The fun thing is that with Linux these days you have the option of a powerful workstation that you can upgrade be it laptop or desktop, can do gaming, and is private. The next thing for me is to "decloud" - meaning remove any and all online services that are not mission critical.

I use an iPhone and other than that I hope to not use anything else that’s so cloud reliable. Maybe an AppleTV if I get one, but I only watch sports so a few cable channels are more than enough for me I think.

The nasty issue is that even tvs are turning into covert spies and are starting to show ads. So even if all you do is watch cable channels, the TV itself might still be spying on you. You perhaps need a "filter" such as a raspberry pi or a device that can transfer content via HDMI and have the tv completely cutoff from the internet. Really dubious times we are in.

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

#137

Post by vxNsr »

listenallyall wrote: post #85
zulban wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely sounds like you just need to learn a few more basic skills to use Linux. Also good to note: there's tons of problems uniquely with windows that I'm sure are just "computer problems" and "computer slowness" to you, and you never blame windows.

Not the OP - but I think it's the use of the word "basic" that turns a lot of people off. "Basic" in Windows is all stuff you can easily do with a mouse. Getting anywhere with Linux requires comfort with the command line, OK, but even after spending a decent amount of time, there are lots of system-specific and application-specific commands that you need to master to actually get the system humming. And a total rabbi…

Yup, the nice thing about windows was everything was accessible by both mouse and keyboard so for people who needed the gui to figure things out it’s there for you and for people who are comfortable on the keyboard you used to be able to never think about the mouse. (This is no longer the case on windows 10 even, they’ve totally neutered keyboard navigation and you often need to reach for the mouse or use the arrow keys excessively for many things now).

Linux requires being super comfortable on the keyboard, using cli nearly exclusively and recalling with perfect accuracy arcane letter incantations which if you know the guy who wrote the program and the full name of his dog makes sense but to everyone else is just random letters strung together.

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

#138

Post by daft_pink »

it's really terrible. I recently had an awful experience with apple and dumped all my apple products and moved to windows. I really feel microsoft's multi-monitor support, wsl, compatibility is a lot better, but the built in spyware from microsoft is outrageous.

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

#139

Post by mplanchard »

masklinn wrote: post #56
artemonster wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Every distribution has its variation of a task manager, and there’s always (h)top and kill as baseline standards. Having everything lock up I don’t think I’ve ever seen, only way I could see that happen is a runaway process eats all the memory of the machine, and somehow dodges the OOM killer. Especially if the machine is configured with no swap (don’t do that). And I’m saying that as someone who doesn’t really like…

Ubuntu ships with woefully inadequate swap these days. We have to advise our employees to customize the installation process, or they get hangs while building C or Rust packages that sound like what GP is describing

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

#140

Post by autoexec »

Kye wrote: post #122
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I can't imagine I'm seeing the same thing as what's got so many people up in arms about the start menu. Did I get a weird OEM configuration? To answer that question, check out the screenshot in the article. If you have a similar spittoon-load of crapware installed, you have the same experience as ~everyone else and for some reason you aren't registering it. If you don't, something ethical happened.

I guess it comes down to what you perceive as crapware. I accepted a long time ago that I'm not the target audience for anything aimed at the mainstream. There were some icons I unpinned for apps and tool installers I didn't need. None of them were actually installed. They just went to the MS store. No biggie. I'd expect a lot of people to appreciate links to install/access very mainstream things like Office or Insta…

It's a bit frightening that they've beaten you down to the point where you don't even recognize the ads and crapware on "your" computer for what they are.

Spyware is still every bit as invasive and harmful as it was in the Bonzi Buddy days, but it looks a bit different and now ships as part of OS itself. You should try to unblind yourself to it because no matter how much you think you aren't affected by it you are absolutely being taken advantage of.

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