It’s good that these tools exist, but it’s so frustrating that it’s a constant cat and mouse game of Microsoft trying to make their products as cumbersome and shit as possible and the community trying to salvage Windows to the best of their ability.
At what point do OEMs just say actually nah, I’m tired of you making our laptops frustrating to use?
At what point do they say fuck it I’m going the Valve route and moving away from a company that wants to undermine my products and my brand?
uhh they will include copilot key in keyboard in new laptops…
To be fair, Window$ has been bloat since the very day M$ stole it from its Unix roots, and Linux is everything that the OS could’ve been were it not run by money-grubbin’ cringelords.
Unix roots? Lol wtf
Why wtf?
Microsoft started as a UNIX-based programming company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
Hell you see remnants of it in the reserved filename list.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming-a-file?redirectedfrom=MSDN
Devices in windows are not typically “files” like they are in unix/linux… So why CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM0, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, COM¹, COM², COM³, LPT0, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9, LPT¹, LPT², and LPT³ are all reserved? Because they maintained compatibility with features businesses used at the time… and never deprecated the function.
Edit:
Why are we downvoting literal computer history? It is a known fact that Windows started on Unix systems. It’s a known fact that they released their own BSD-based software up to and including a full fledged Unix-based OS, and it’s a known fact that MS-DOS 1 and 2 were both Unix compatible. This is LITERALLY the definition of “roots”. Are we so touchy here that we can’t acknowledge actual computing history?Hmm, I always thought MS was founded to steal/modify MS DOS. Interesting that they briefly did Unix stuff, but I still take issue with the way op phrased it. “Their Unix roots” makes it sound like they were heavily invested in Unix and carried that forward even into windows. I don’t know if they used any of that code in windows, but if they did you’d never know it by using dos or any windows version I’ve seen. Even despite both having command line interfaces, almost everything is different from Unix except the command “cd”, to my recollection.
At what point do OEMs just say actually nah, I’m tired of you making our laptops frustrating to use?
LTT put out an (surprisingly insightful) video about ChromeOS and how it’s kind of secretly spreading Linux. I don’t think its crazy to say that in 5-10 years ChromeOS or similar will be the default and Windows will be a premium add on or something.
“premium”
lol honestly maybe competition will force them to reverse the ehittification of their product
The people who use tools like this are in the minority. The majority (probably the vast majority) of people use Windows as it is out of the box.
The number for people I have seen with search box still enabled in taskbar tells me that’s true.
Everyone. Everywhere.
It blows my mind, but then I realise that we here on Lemmy are the 1% of IT users.
Yeah right‽ Why do people keep the full search box enabled? It takes up so much space. I usually switch to the search button.
I even see quite a lot of people in IT (not talking about tech or devs) that keep it enabled.
I think it’s one of those things that just becomes mentally invisible after a while. Like Microsoft slowly just drops in a new bar here, a stock ticker there, and there’s a point where a majority of folks are like “…Was that always there?” and don’t bother hunting for a way to turn it off like we do lol.
Yes, I know.
But it’s not like these people actually love ads all over the place, or bing results in start menus, or popups asking them to pwetty pwease use OneDrive, or can you pwetty pwetty pwease use Edge instead of Chrome, they just either:
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don’t know they can get rid of that stuff
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don’t trust tools and are afraid they’ll break something or the tools will contain a virus
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don’t care enough to research this crap
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view using their PC as a chore anyway, and so power through the annoyances
I don’t own a Mac, and don’t intend to, but of the biggest things people like about them is that there are far fewer of these types of annoyances.
It’s not just extreme power users that can be irked by all this crap - they’re just the ones who do things about it and chat on forums about it. A normal person just sighs and thinks ugh I’d rather just do this on my phone
View using their PC as a chore anyway, and so power through the annoyances
Damn, good one.
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At what point do OEMs just say actually nah, I’m tired of you making our laptops frustrating to use?
You’re under the impression that most people care about the horrible parts of windows?
I think they do.
Enough to do much about it, other than maybe buy a MacBook if they have money to burn? Nah.
But enough to use their PC less and try to do as much as possible on their phone/iPad? Honestly, yeah, I think so.
I hear normies complaining about stuff in Windows all the time. It’s just when you go “well you could…” they turn off and don’t want to do anything about it, because to them you may as well be giving them advice on how they can hack their washing machine to wash clothes faster. It’s just an appliance.
Is your point that you think laptop and desktop makers could increase sales by ditching windows? That feels like suicide to me and I am a Linux lover. At what point do they do that is what you asked. When they’re desperate enough to take a risk, if ever, would be my guess
Can you imagine installing Windows and having to install 10 seperate programs just to fix all the issues with it?
Every day with Windows is like this. It’s a fucking nightmare. I don’t know what else to do.
Install linux :)
i didn’t even have to scroll to find the first instance of this comment
Truly Truly, I say unto you, install Linux; it’s what you really must do.
I have a few games that don’t run on Steam. How big of a pain is it to get them running?
This is like 50-70% of my PC usage.
Fairly easy with something like lutris or the heroic game launcher if said games are on gig amazon gaming or epic
No, they have their own launchers.
Right, right. Smh
Onenote, publisher, CAD. Excel (and don’t give me open/libre can do it, no they can’t. They are marginally compatible).
And a laundry list more of the issues trying to replace windows with Linux on the desktop.
If you work by yourself and don’t share docs, yea, could probably work. I need to trust that what I send is what people see.
Try to open an excel workbook with tables on open/libre and see what happens.
It’s called WinPilot now.
install random third party software that may be sniffing or leaking information to remove shady features from windows that sniff and leak information.
windows sucks.
For me it is so weird, that you have to use extra tools to disable telemetry and unwanted features in windows systems. Why is windows not giving me a central option to decide on those things? Is it maybe because they do not want me to decide for myself and therefore splitting the places where I need to disable all that unwanted stuff as opaque as possible? Can they be more obvious that they do not value your opinion on how you want your OS to behave?
Quit Windows. It is a dead end and get worst with every release.
If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.
I switched to linux yeats ago but i now need to build myself a windows 11 base image thats as lightweight as possible for my vms and im dreading that immeansly. I just want onw toll that can kill literally everything thats unessasary. I mean unless proton and wine has gotten good enough to run autocad programs.
Use Windows LTSC, it doesn’t have this stuff. Then permanently license it with the MAS tool on github (let me go find a link)
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
Courtesy of subtext
This is absolutely the way. My wife needed windows for school recently… Ltsc was the only way to go.
I use windows 11 for work and it’s absolutely horrible… took them a year to let us ungroup windows on the task bar. Win11 literally didn’t ship with that ability.
Tiny11 is good too!
Yep.
Isn’t Tiny11 just LTSC with stuff removed? My Tiny10 VM reports as LTSC.
Thanks for updating the link, I forgot!
want your OS
That’s the problem, it’s not your OS.
Although im part of the Linux crowd, if you’re tired of reapplying debloat scripts every update, you could get the W10 IoT LTSC edition that only has security patches with no updates. You will have to pirate it though.
This might be interesting. I’m looking to have a few installs to test some of my programs in an actual Windows environment without having to daily drive Windows and without having to deal with all the unnecessary changes MS wants to make.
Tiny 10/11
https://archive.org/details/tiny-11-NTDEV
Activation script
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
Edit: My Tiny10 reports as LTSC for some reason, but I’m pretty sure Tiny isn’t based on LTSC now that I’ve done some more reading.
Neat. I tried this last night on my once top of the line machine (in 2012) because why not…
It didn’t upgrade my win10 install but at least it didn’t delete all my data. Maybe I goofed on that as I was tired.
I used the 23H2 iso but it installed 22H2.
I didn’t use the script, it picked up my existing valid key.
It fails to update. Perhaps that’s the point or bloat would come back?
But if it can’t update then what’s the point?
Again, might be my fault but I’m not really trusting this image yet. Not enough to reinstall and relicense my tools.
I use Linux where I can but I’m bound to some windows-only proprietary software. I do use a stripped down win10 VM for a lot of it but at least it updates.
Will update this comment if i find that I’m at fault.
LTSC only gets security updates. No feature updates.
It’s intended for stability, so you don’t wake up and suddenly nothing works right because of an update. That won’t happen on LTSC.
I wouldn’t use it to update an existing install, that’s not what it’s intended for (and probably pointless as it may retain stuff that came with the existing os).
Thank you. It does seem cool but I can’t really keep up. I appreciate the explanation. I really thought it was a fully workable de-bloated win11. Which it is, but I need long term installs. I learned a few things though! So not a waste.
If i could ever figure out how to run a windows app via VM. Seamless mode comes close but not quite enough.
Anyway thanks and I didn’t mean to be negative, just didn’t totally get it.
I do both and happy with debloated Windows 11 Enterprise with automatic updates restricted to security only. Pirating now is running a powershell command that fetches activation scripts from github.
To this point just use Linux already. You will be doing a lot of telemetry cleaning and even might be breaking things.
My anti-cheat don’t work on Linux
But that’s worse, because that implies ring 0 anticheat. That is synonym of rootkit.
or use the enterprise edition which is the only windows edition with an option to disable telemetry using group policy editor. in the other versions, you have to resort to terrible hacks.
It is bad the AMD support in windows. In Linux is better in my case. For sysadmin sorry but powershell is overengineered garbage. You need a very long command when in shell you got in three pipes. Even what are your proposing its hard to do, and sincerely i think it is better to just use a sane linux distro.
idk it’s over-engineered but it’s actually pretty cool in it’s own way. it’s like a crappier version of nushell i guess. still I’d rather use nu.
As someone who uses windows to produce music, bloat is a huge issue, latencymon Is a great tool to check for programs and drivers that can cause audio dropouts.
And win 11 has been great, didn’t have to change much to get it to work. I tried several forms of Linux and it was too slow, driver issues, and plugins that were impossible to get working.
Win 10 was bad, but 7 was worse.
It really is a shame that music production is so painful in Linux. All I need to make the final switch
After leaving Macs (and Logic) (Apple software great, Apple iMac shit) switched to LInux over 10 years ago. Haven’t made music since (hardware in boxes). Fully learned that Linux music ain’t got that swing.
I recently heard that newer PipeWire has improved things a quite a lot. Haven’t tried it yet … not sure I remember how to play any instruments any more.
You could try bitwig, the daw is really good and has a native linux client for years.
Ya know … I’ll just give that a close hard look. Thanks!
just use linux lmao
did i type this right? are you going to upvote my comment
I’ve no idea what MS are even doing with all this shit.
I’m like 95% sure I had an AI icon in the search bar yesterday, and today it’s a briefcase. 🤷
I have no idea why they’re even remotely interested in Windows as a product anymore. Surely they can’t expect that much revenue from integrated AI services when most of the general public’s needs can be covered by web services that will severely outmatch Microsoft’s development speed (y’know because of juggling legacy code and all).
Considering the fact that they gain most of their revenue by far from their Azure cloud services and enterprise customers, it just seems like a stupid business decision to invest this much into all kinds of random features for their desktop OS aimed at consumers.
In proper systems architectecture theory, we generally try to avoid mixing up functionality this much because a modular design allows your system to evolve without too much pain. Why build all this crap into Windows when you can just opt-in by installing an application for it?
I really don’t get it…
They make a lot off of business licencing. They still push the consumer and education side in order to create familiarity.
“Gaming contributed $7.11 billion in revenue for the quarter, more than the $5.26 billion from Windows, but behind the $13.47 billion from Office and cloud services and the giant $23.95 billion from server products and cloud services.”
I’ve never had any major issues with windows and I can strip out what I don’t like, so whatevs. I like Linux, but gaming, so I roll with windows.
Windows Server on the other hand, fuck that noise. Ugh.
Gamings gotten pretty good with linux. I made the switcheroo when windows forced an update that undid a lot of my changes to windows AGAIN and I was like evwrytime they do this I have to take time to finish this and was pissed.
All games I play work on Linux no problem and all the games I’ve been interested since then have worked day 1; but of course I’ve always taken issue with games that have kernel level anticheats.
I used to have a power shell script that a coworker gave me that would uninstall a huge number of services and apps on windows, change a bunch of config settings etc.
I’ve always wished there were a way to roll out a stripped windows release as an open source project without getting sued.
There is. It’s called slipstreaming and IT people have been doing it for decades
There’s a pretty funny disconnect on Lemmy of hardcore Linux users that have very very obviously never supported enterprise environments and have no understanding of how important windows is
WE DON’T FUCKING CARE THAT YOU’RE USING LINUX
Yeah but we care that youre not.
Why u’re caring?
Because they’re the ones that constantly make a fuss and are overall holding back the computing world by supporting a malicious organization that has a choke hold.
The people saying to switch to Linux are half-joking, half-serious. Sometimes we can be a little too pushy by bringing up “just switch to Linux” too often, but usually we have good intentions for at least trying to encourage the switch, and it often-times does come from a place of care.
It’s a good way of being written off so no one listens to you
I use AtlasOS to debloat and optimize (disabling animations, annoying requests and so on) Windows 10/11
I removed it by installing Linux
Annnnnnnnnnnd there it is!
go to linux alreadiii
What’s slowing down Linux adoption?
Is it the monopoly Microsoft has on all PC hardware and strong relationships it has with desktop software partners that make leaving windows near impossible?
No, it must be the users.
/s insert principal Skinner meme
Gaming
I forgot what 2008 was like. Thanks for the reminder
Sigh.
Sure.
Now how do you: CAD, exchange, Publisher, Access, Excel (no, open versions of excel still don’t come close, they can’t even do tables), Onenote/SharePoint, etc, etc.
And Linux is as messed up in its own way. Power management is off by default, so it kills your laptop battery (at least on every version I’ve tested). Notifications that you can’t silence without looking up a command line.
No, the learning curve is still too steep to recommend to people who I will have to support.
And while the Open/Libre office apps are “compatible”, people don’t have time to waste dealing with the ways they whack a document. Libre couldn’t even properly display the spreadsheet I use to setup a new machine, with 3 sheets and a few hundred lines, because tables.
“Switch to Linux” is a simplistic answer that doesn’t address the needs of users. And I use Linux every day, as a serverOS, running VM’s and docker.
What learning curve? Whether my mom clicks on the Firefox icon in Ubuntu or Windows makes zero difference
Dude literally just explained the issues facing actual workers that use computers for productive activities, not your mother looking up tendie recipes.
uh hu, you locked yourself in. Imo if you dont need Excel, OneNote or any of that shit, its perfectly cool. For devs its even nicer not to have to deal with all the windows shit ways of doing things. As for documents, LaTeX is great.
Also, in the end, the command line is even easier than having to learn shitty user interfaces. And you get much faster with command line too. Windows likes to have 3 different design languages from different decades for no reason.
Using it as OS and as Server, it has been perfect for years.
People who don’t use it either have a life and simply dont want things to change, or are too foolish to realise they are getting trolled with every update.
For people starting, just dual boot a Linux Distro. For the shit that requires windows boot into it. The rest can all be done in linux. Even boots faster.
And for average people probably the google documents / slides […] will be more than enough.
Rip to people that need windows shit to be in their life for work. Though they could also use a windows vm.
