Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by Kye » Mon, Aug 21, 2023, 4:00 PM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #140

Kye wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

That's absurd. They're shortcuts like any other. Nothing is even pre-installed like when OEMs would ship computers with AOL or Compuserve when those were popular.

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

#142

Post by autoexec » Mon, Aug 21, 2023, 4:06 PM UTC

Kye wrote: post #141

autoexec wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

That's absurd. They're shortcuts like any other. Nothing is even pre-installed like when OEMs would ship computers with AOL or Compuserve when those were popular.

They are ads if they link to an app store, and bloatware if they've actually installed that crap on your machine. The shortcuts on my machine are for things I personally chose and installed and none of them open an app store. I've had cell phones that came with apps pre-installed like facebook that couldn't even be uninstalled normally. Does that count as "just a shortcut" too?

Those shortcuts weren't put there for you as a courtesy. Those are paid advertisements

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

#143

Post by deadlydose » Mon, Aug 21, 2023, 4:11 PM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #96

buro9 wrote: post #42

Now it's just like the Apple experience! Anyone who thinks otherwise, do go through a full install and then observe how many apps are installed that you cannot uninstall. And it's true that you can't really uninstall things from Windows either... Xbox 360 Bar... it will be there forever. If you ever touch Windows Hello PIN logon, that will never be disabled again. The only way to have an OS install be minimal is to c…

I'm a Linux user, but you can't always easily remove the random crap that gets installed. An Ubuntu server install will come with "modem manager" (wtf does that even do?!) and a bunch of other crap which isn't exactly useful in a VM environment. Yet if you try to remove them, you'll find that it tries to remove the whole system since it depends on "ubuntu-server" or some such. Sure, you could remove that meta package…

This sounds like an Ubuntu problem. My web server is running Debian 12 and ModemManager isn't even installed. For shiggles I installed it just so I could remove it. The extra packages it installed are libjim0.81 libmbim-glib4 libmbim-proxy libmbim-utils libqmi-glib5 libqmi-proxy libqmi-utils libqrtr-glib0 usb-modeswitch usb-modeswitch-data and these are exactly the packages it told me I could autoremove after removing ModemManager.

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

#144

Post by masklinn » Mon, Aug 21, 2023, 4:12 PM UTC

mplanchard wrote: post #139

masklinn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is frustrating to read. Swap you're not using doesn't hurt anyone, but having no swap can really screw you up.

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

#145

Post by trulyrandom » Mon, Aug 21, 2023, 4:14 PM UTC

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 share your frustration about the Nvidia situation. However, if you want to run a certain operating system and have a good experience, you need to buy hardware that's well-supported on that operating system. It's as simple as that. This is a little like buying an M1 Mac and complaining that Linux doesn't run well on it.

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

#146

Post by delta_p_delta_x » Mon, Aug 21, 2023, 4:16 PM UTC

Okay; very contrasting opinion here: I use Windows 10 Enterprise, and I don't have any of the crud. I'm holding off on upgrades to Windows 11 until there's a killer feature there that I really need on Windows 10, and so far... nothing yet.

As a developer, I use Windows... a lot. I can't imagine writing complicated C++ without Visual Studio; the debugger is just that good. I regularly script and administer my installs with PowerShell. I like writing fast GUI code that will run on Windows XP with not much fuss.

Now, I like nuance, so I will distinguish between Windows, the OS—which is actually really nice—and Windows the bean-county bit, which sucks.

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

#147

Post by thiht » Mon, Aug 21, 2023, 4:47 PM UTC

rollcat wrote: post #109

NotSteve wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Big Sur's redesign is an unusable mess. Window borders are pure white. Contrast is non-existent, especially on buttons (both light and dark modes). Too much transparency, it's not just distracting - the menu bar is often unusable (depending on your wallpaper). Many builtin apps exercise too much freedom in customising the look&feel, everything is inconsistent. I understand this was done to bring the design language c…

> Big Sur's redesign is an unusable mess

That’s a hot take. Big Sur’s redesign is perfectly fine.

The only redesign I hate is Settings (especially since it disallows full screen, WHY?), but the rest is fine, and arguably less « in your face »

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

#148

Post by thiht » Mon, Aug 21, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #146

Okay; very contrasting opinion here: I use Windows 10 Enterprise, and I don't have any of the crud. I'm holding off on upgrades to Windows 11 until there's a killer feature there that I really need on Windows 10, and so far... nothing yet. As a developer, I use Windows... a lot . I can't imagine writing complicated C++ without Visual Studio; the debugger is just that good. I regularly script and administer my install…

98 was great

Millenium Edition sucked

XP was great

Vista sucked

Windows 7 was great

Windows 8 sucked

Windows 10 was (is) great

Windows 11 sucks

At this point it’s a tradition. Stick to Windows 10 until Windows 12 comes I guess

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

#149

Post by sotapanna » Mon, Aug 21, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

roxil wrote: post #117

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…

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…

Are you on Windows 11? There is an ongoing fTPM issue with AMD firmware that can cause behavior like that. I had this issue and ultimately just disabled TPM in the BIOS. Its supposed to be required for Win 11, but I haven't seen any issues since disabling.

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

#150

Post by xethos » Mon, Aug 21, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #142

Kye wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absurd. They're shortcuts like any other. Nothing is even pre-installed like when OEMs would ship computers with AOL or Compuserve when those were popular.

They are ads if they link to an app store, and bloatware if they've actually installed that crap on your machine. The shortcuts on my machine are for things I personally chose and installed and none of them open an app store. I've had cell phones that came with apps pre-installed like facebook that couldn't even be uninstalled normally. Does that count as "just a shortcut" too? Those shortcuts weren't put there for y…

> ... apps pre-installed [...] that couldn't even be uninstalled normally. Does that count as "just a shortcut" too?

I mean, logistically I'd expect parent to agree with that. They don't take up any additional space that you, the end-user, could take advantage of (because they were on the system partition).

Personally, I agree that stating which programs are to be installed on your hardware is a good way to determine who actually owns the hardware, but if parent is logically consistent, then sure: it'd be "just a shortcut" that the average end-user will take advantage of.