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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

#91

Post by xg15 »

> First, Microsoft account sign-in was made mandatory instead of optional (though third-party tools like Rufus can work around this, and Windows 11 Pro still lets you use a local account if you know all the right buttons to click). It's the Microsoft account sign-in that prompts most of the annoying behavior during the OOBE process.

I think this is becoming yet another "boiling the frog" strategy: You don't even have to make this stuff completely impossible - you only have to add enough friction and general unpleasantness that the (mental) costs of using a local account exceed the benefits.

Then companies have their cake and eat it too: To everyone saying they are now forced to use an account they can reply "oh no, it's technically still possible to use the software without an account, so no coercion happens" while everyone who actually tries to do so will either give up or look like a lunatic.

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

#92

Post by skinner927 »

artemonster wrote: post #31
Corsome wrote: 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…

ctrl+alt+f2 to switch to tty2. Log in and reap whatever is hanging. Logout. ctrl + alt + f7 (usually) to get back to the GUI.

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

#93

Post by hardware2win »

majewsky wrote: post #60
hardware2win wrote: post #36

>A prompt to pair your phone with your PC. >A Microsoft 365 trial offer. >A 100GB OneDrive offer. >A $1 introductory PC Game Pass offer. Whats so bad about those?

In Futurama, there is a gag where Fry finds out about ads being injected in his dreams through brain waves or something. When he is upset by this, his peers do not understand him. So he explains: "Of course we had ads in the 20th century... but only on billboards, and buses, and milk cartons, and [list goes on for a while]. But not in dreams! Nuh-uh!" I think what's happening here is two things: First, a personal com…

>First, a personal computing device is fundamentally an extension of your own self into the digital world

Id never call dumb ass computer as a "my extension" despite the fact that it pays me well and I use it a lot.

Maybe if youre social media addict then yea.

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

#94

Post by Corsome »

dagw wrote: post #29
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.

Yup, same here. And the sad things is that Windows was getting so close. Between WSL2, the new terminal and ssh, all the support for VSCode and better dev tools and open source language support, I was becoming a bit of Windows 'fan' and this close to seriously considering Windows 10 a fully usable developer desktop. Then they released Windows 11 and completely shit the bed.

Personally I think there are multiple forces acting on Windows at the same time. Some of them push it to a good direction (cases you mentioned) some of them less so.

We live in a times that are good for developers: we not only have free access to powerful tools that other professionals need to pay big bucks but it goes even further: with open source we can co-shape these tools and in the extreme cases fork and create our own derivatives.

Why not take advantage of this and just avoid proprietary solutions as much as possible?

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

#95

Post by haunter »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #77
haunter wrote: post #52

Windows 11 Enterprise + activate it with MAS. It's a clean Windows 11 w/o anything. Windows 10 LTSC is the same. (Windows 11 LTSC will come later next year) I use these for years and don't have any problems.

Not everyone wants to cough up for an Enterprise license for a home PC.

Well I don't pay for it :shrug: https://massgrave.dev/

MS doesn't care either, they rather have you pirating it than switch to Mac

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

#96

Post by vladvasiliu »

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 and reinstall the things you actually need manually, but that's still a terrible pita.

At least all this junk doesn't start up random daemons, like windows does.

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

#97

Post by unpopularopp »

Waterluvian wrote: post #62

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…

Same. Wanted to undervolt my RTX 4080, and it seems impossible under Linux. These small things are very missing from Linux.

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

#98

Post by rollcat »

Waterluvian wrote: post #62

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…

I feel exactly like that on bad days. On good days though, I'm happy using a heterogenous environment. I can use a Mac to play games or watch movies; Linux to productively write backend code rather than waste time fighting Docker-in-VM; or OpenBSD to feel a brief, soothing wave of sanity.

I think there is still hope for Windows as well. It's basically like the Star Trek movies: every bad release seems to be followed by a slightly better one.

The only thing I can't quite make peace with is using #ffffff for window decorations. Whatever you're smoking Apple, it's time to quit it.

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

#99

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

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 could there be?

Surely they have many years to enshittify this as well, but in 2023, the ChromeOS experience is clean and mature, it's less expensive, and it's easy on your resources.

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

#100

Post by oefrha »

LegitShady wrote: post #49
twsted wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: 'Apple doesn't mandate Apple ID sign-in. Apple does put "helpful" "reminders" about setting up Apple Pay, iCloud backups, and a few other things into its setup screens, but it doesn't take your full screen over again to try to get you to opt in to things you've already said no to. There is a notification in the Settings app asking you to sign in and set a few things up if you haven't, but they're di…

Personally I find putting things in the setting screen with a red indicator to be much scarier to the average person. It doesn't say join iCloud in the heading it says "your iPad is not backed up" and uses that to scare people. Personally I find the dislike of both to be reasonable and I don't think Microsoft's is much worse than apple.

Microsoft literally flags not setting up OneDrive as a security issue in Windows Defender or whatever the current iteration is called. The warning pops up in routine scans.
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