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2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

windowscentral.com

81–90 of 330 posts

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#81

I did a clean install of Windows 11 when Windows 10 went EOL. From all of the complaints I was hearing from headlines I expected a disastrous experience. But to be honest, it’s been fine. I’m not a heavy user but I switch to the Windows PC at least once a day for a few hours of CAD, gaming, and one other engineering program that is Windows only. I don’t click any of the AI buttons. I declined the OneDrive or backup s…

Give it a few undocumented updates that change your settings in the background, and come back to give us an update. Even my Win10 extended support is getting CoPilot shoved down the pipeline silently.

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#83
Windows 11 isn't too bad after running Win11Debloat, but I get quite annoyed when an update shows "You're 100% there" for more than a second. 100% means done, why aren't you done yet?

When I was working on a deployment dashboard, I made it show ">0%" or "<100%" near the endpoints, to avoid misleading rounding.

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has been primarily Mac for most of my life, I started using a Windows machine fairly recently for work. I'm tied down to the Windows eco-system (Teams, Outlook, etc). I still haven't gotten use to the idea of every link in Microsoft apps opening in Edge regardless of your settings. This might seem like a small thing, but the entire UX seems to be designed around benefiting Microsoft, not the user.

It is incredibly user hostile. And it's not even free. This is an ecosystem you pay for. They're treating folks shelling out $200 for an OS as if they were cattle on the adtech train.

Who is actually shelling out $200 for Windows specifically?

It's perceptually free if you bought it with your PC. And it's actually free if you took advantage of the free upgrade offer.

I've picked up a few licenses off MacHeist for like $10

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#85

I did a clean install of Windows 11 when Windows 10 went EOL. From all of the complaints I was hearing from headlines I expected a disastrous experience. But to be honest, it’s been fine. I’m not a heavy user but I switch to the Windows PC at least once a day for a few hours of CAD, gaming, and one other engineering program that is Windows only. I don’t click any of the AI buttons. I declined the OneDrive or backup s…

It’s been fine? Are you completely immune to attention grabbing features? I absolutely cannot use win11 as it comes on a stock lenovo. Maybe you got your hands on some corporate version with some of the standard settings off? But between the news feed and the advertising in the start menu I find stock installs to he maddening, and I loath needing to boot my win11 partition.

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#86

I did a clean install of Windows 11 when Windows 10 went EOL. From all of the complaints I was hearing from headlines I expected a disastrous experience. But to be honest, it’s been fine. I’m not a heavy user but I switch to the Windows PC at least once a day for a few hours of CAD, gaming, and one other engineering program that is Windows only. I don’t click any of the AI buttons. I declined the OneDrive or backup s…

Give it a few undocumented updates that change your settings in the background, and come back to give us an update. Even my Win10 extended support is getting CoPilot shoved down the pipeline silently.

I’m not this person, but I installed win11 a month or two after launch and have lived through many many updates.

I’ve never had a single setting switched from what I set it to. Nor have I had AI shoved down my throat. My guess is that since I set it up with a local account originally and have never added a MSFT account, that insulates me from a lot of the issues others have seen.

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#87
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last 3 generations of nvidia gpus have been a big middle finger to PC gamers in terms of price and power usage Gone are the days of affordable graphics accelerators in the $300 to $500 range. Now it’s $1000 to $2000. 400 watts now instead of 100.

> Gone are the days of affordable graphics accelerators in the $300 to $500 range. Now it’s $1000 to $2000. What are you talking about? nVidia only has two models in the $1000 to $2000 range and they’re clearly premium parts. The $300 to $500 cards are actually fine for normal gaming unless you demand to play at 4K at high settings.

> The $300 to $500 cards are actually fine for normal gaming unless you demand to play at 4K at high settings.

I don't think that wanting to play games at the native resolution of your screen without changing settings from their defaults in order to make the game look and perform much worse is a very unreasonable "demand".

That used to be possible without spending as much money and it's also not unreasonable for people to point that out

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#88
Something I've also noticed is a trending "silent exodus" from Windows 11 to Linux and macOS from a bunch of non-technical users.

Compared to the past, where some friend or relative who asked for help into moving from Windows to Linux or Mac usually had a certain ideology-driven strain in their decision, nowadays the requests I receive are along the lines of "look, I'm tired of Windows weirdness, I need something that doesn't change in weird ways between reboots, even if everything is not compatible 100%".

As of late my default answer has been "Do you need Photoshop or Office? Buy the cheapest Apple M-something laptop you can find. Otherwise tell me when you're free so we can install Linux on your machine", usually a bog standard version of Fedora KDE.

I've moved circa 10-12 laptops in the last year to Fedora, and outside of a single case it went way better than I expected. I've asked multiple times if they're ok and at least until now they all were like "yep, fine."

They do their job, expect their work device to never change in meaningful ways, and then forget about it for the rest of the day. Also they are not going to buy a new laptop just because a popup tells them their 3-years old pc can't be upgraded to Windows 11 for whatever reason.

Also we've reached a point where they couldn't care less if something like deCSS or an MP4 codec is missing. Entertainment apps are usually delegated to a tablet or an internet connected TV, as long as Youtube works they're fine.

They're people who don't really care about open source, GNU, Software Freedoms or so on. They're looking for something that doesn't interrupt them with Copilot this or AI Update that while they're having a call or a meeting on slack/teams/whatever.

Truth is linux has become... "Eh, good enough, that'll do it" for most people. Which is a lot more enticing compared to "Pay 400€ for something you already own and spend the rest of the day closing popups".

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#89
post #7

So. Nvidia abandons the gaming market, Microsoft abandons Windows and Google abandons Search, all because AI is supposedly more important. At some point it starts to feel like a drug for C-suites.

The C-suites are there to please the shareholders more than the customers. The shareholders hear how much AI companies are supposedly making and believe money is being left on the table lest their co-owned companies invest in AI too. The C-suites then go after AI as none of them wants to be told they haven't done anything to profit off it.

Re: 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

#90

This seems to be a story written for the HN audience, rather than for the core user base. Despite a long trend of predictions of Windows demise, it is still very much here and healthy as a platform for user install. I could also write the same article about this website, how it was so full of bloat and ads that nobody wants I could barely get it to scroll, and it eventually crashed before getting to the end of TFA du…

If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

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