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The Windows 11 Trash Party

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Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#41

Post by fortran77 »

userbinator wrote: post #5

Windows is definitely adware now. Microsoft saw how much the average user would install, and thought "we can do that too"; of course, by being "official", their own adware is much harder to remove. Windows can show the weather in the bottom left of the task bar, which is nice I've never wanted that feature nor found it appealing. I can just look outside if I want to know the weather where I am, or visit a site otherw…

I agree it's awful because ordinary users don't bother to turn it off.

But it wasn't _that_ hard to turn it off. I didn't have to hack anything, just look for the settings.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#42

Post by WWLink »

sho_hn wrote: post #4

If you've never used an older Windows, here is a Win 2000 in the browser: https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr... (The Qemu.js post on the front page today lead me there via a readme link to jslinux.)

It's probably my computer/browser, but that feels hella slow. For those getting ideas, Windows 2000 was lightning fast to use. Even on something humble at the time. Those windows and menus popped up instantly.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#43

Post by djbusby »

ajoseps wrote: post #19

the ads in the start and weather widget bothered me enough to switch to Linux for my desktop. I mostly use Windows to play games and Proton/Steam has gotten good enough that a lot of games I play now work on Linux. The only place I still use Windows is my laptop since battery management isn't as great... but if it gets better I'm hoping over to Linux as well there.

I'm on Gentoo with mostly stock kernel, Xfce and my battery life is pretty good! It sleeps and goes dim just fine. Lenovo Yoga6. But I had to swap they pieceofcrap RealTek WIFI for Intel - cause the rtw89 module has sleep issues (and that card generally sucks)

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#44

Post by goosedragons »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #30

Edit: I'm comparing it with Windows 10. For me it felt like Microsoft lost it's way after 8.1 and now coming back to the Windows 7 way of things. Design wise aero looks similar. Windows 11 has been the most beautiful most stable and consistent windows I've ever used. It feels like a modern and rock stable update of Windows 7. I never got a blue screen or anything bad. Finally it feels like Microsoft is trying to make…

Did you get a lot of blue screens with 7 through 10? Or Vista even? Besides one PC that 7 vehemently disagreed with (couldn't run 7 for more than 5 minutes) I think I've had 2 in the past decade.

Personally I think Windows 11 is ugly, the rounded corners, the whole way the icons are shaded, especially the junk they stick in the search bar.

The new context menu is HORRID. It itself is inconsistent! So I'm baffled to see it claimed to be so. There's nothing consistent about having some menu items run horizontal and some vertical. It's awful. Yeah, lets make the most important menu items be smaller targets and harder to parse.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#45

Post by rincebrain »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #35
teruakohatu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows 11 has been the most beautiful most stable and consistent windows I've ever used. It feels like a modern and rock stable update of Windows 7. I never got a blue screen or anything bad. Preventing updates is herculean and some of those updates inject advertisements [1]. It feels like Windows 11 is constantly changing and I have no control over it. > or use the "Show more options" button occasionally. It feel…

Windows update has never been an issue for me, I think it's because I turn off my computer every night? It just happens itself and never bothers me. I understand other people won't be using their computers like me. You can still disable the Windows update service or use Group Policy I think. You can revert to the old context menu in that case: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restor...

I think the complaint was less WU bothering them with disrupting their workflow by installing updates, and more that WU sometimes installs adware as an "update", and Microsoft decided around Win10 that it was tired of users disabling updates until they wanted to update, and stopped letting you do that without really invasive changes.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#46

Post by pxc »

gigel82 wrote: post #6

> there is no way to turn this news feed off There are several layers to "turning it off". You can use Personalization -> Taskbar to turn off the "Widgets" icon which takes care of the immediate problem. But widgets.exe will continue running in the background, and the only way I found to get rid of that is winget uninstall "Windows Web Experience Pack"

Against fixing this behavior, and others:

The year of the Linux desktop for anyone who regularly browses this site came a long, long time ago.

If you're running Windows today and still telling yourself that you'll switch once it finally gets bad enough, the sad truth is that you'll put up with anything, as long as Microsoft introduces new bad behavior slowly enough to let you acclimate to their successive, increasingly fucked-up 'new normal's. As long as learning how to mitigate Microsoft's next insult to your dignity seems like it'll probably be less work than mastering a whole new operating system, Linux won't seem 'ready' to you.

But accumulating more knowledge about how to partially unfuck Windows only keeps you stuck. So stop. Cleverly, laboriously contending with your OS vendor as a fundamentally hostile party is not a solution— it's the hallmark of serious dysfunction. Don't do it. Don't reward Microsoft's abuse with further investments of your time and energy in 'mastering' their platform. Divest.

Instead of fixing this like it's a benign papercut, let the full badness of Windows wash over you. And then... leave.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#47

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

There are two Microsofts, as I see it.

The one with DevDiv and stuff, which has amazing and mostly free development tools like VS Code, VS 2022, Windows Terminal, WSL, Azure, the .NET ecosystem, the MSVC C++ STL, PowerShell, TypeScript, and so on.

And then there's the bean-counting, irritating part of Microsoft that has stuck around since the 90s and doesn't seem to go away. This part justifies adding advertisements and crapware to Windows, pushing for SaaS (while still charging a LOT), changing the UX of Office programs every version, not being able to implement and release a proper UI library after a decade or so, and pushing laggy Electron apps like Teams instead of developing fast, native ones.

Like many others here, Windows is a daily driver for me. I actually like using it, because a lot of hardware and configurations that need painful finagling on Linux (just try using a multi-monitor high-DPI, mixed-DPI setup on Linux, or any game that has anti-cheat, or touch fingerprint sensors, or HDR and wide colour gamut displays) just work on Windows. It has a massive repository of programs that I use frequently. But some changes are just... irritating.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#48

Post by blibble »

wongarsu wrote: post #22
bigmattystyles wrote: post #14

I went out looking for how much the enterprise (or business) version would cost as I expected those versions would (hopefully) have all this crap removed. Am I wrong in finding you can no longer just buy the enterprise or business version? They want you to either buy a device with it on it or contact their sales rep? Maybe this has always been the casse and I never noticed because most previous versions didn't have t…

There is basically Windows Home, Pro and Pro for Workstations. There's also Enterprise and Education, but those seems to be the same as Pro for Workstations, just distributed differently. Windows 11 Pro is about $150 from official channels, or $30 for a key from a reseller, and the key can just upgrade your Windows Home install. It doesn't automatically fix everything, but it gives you the group policy editor which l…

I've heard the $2 LTSC keys on aliexpress activate without issue

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#49

Post by adithyassekhar »

rincebrain wrote: post #45
adithyassekhar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows update has never been an issue for me, I think it's because I turn off my computer every night? It just happens itself and never bothers me. I understand other people won't be using their computers like me. You can still disable the Windows update service or use Group Policy I think. You can revert to the old context menu in that case: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restor...

I think the complaint was less WU bothering them with disrupting their workflow by installing updates, and more that WU sometimes installs adware as an "update", and Microsoft decided around Win10 that it was tired of users disabling updates until they wanted to update, and stopped letting you do that without really invasive changes.

Oh I agree I had Candy crush installed after an update on Windows 10. But I had nothing of the sort in Windows 11. Yet.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#50

Post by giantrobot »

throwaway8503 wrote: post #27
Waterluvian wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but what percentage of users wanted that feature? Microsoft probably knows.

It's useful as an excuse for the OS to be continuously connected to the internet, which elides nicely into connecting to the internet for search results when you type something in the searchbox. And you can't argue that it's /useless/. It's more information, and, ceteris paribus, more information is better.

The problem is it's not data for you, it's data for Microsoft they turn around and sell. Every ping to their servers is more and more tracking data on you. If you sign into the OS with a Microsoft account, which is virtually required with Windows 11, they've got all of that data correlated with you personally rather than some ID string.
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