The new Start menu is also a significant improvement over the old one, with more icons on show, the ability to turn off Recommended ads, […]
Guys, we are allowed to disable the ads now. We might have been too harsh on microsoft after all.
…insanity, I tell you. Ads, in your face, right in the Start Menu, on your computer that you bought, on your OS that you bought.
Note that it doesn’t disable ads. It just means the ads a user sees will be less relevant to the user based on their browsing history and consumer profiles.
Yup was gonna say the same thing.
They can be removed with third party tools but they shouldn’t be there in the first place.
I already thought it was pretty bad but that is somehow even worse. Par for the course I suppose
I switched to linux and i dual boot pop os windows now. I only use windows to configure things that has no linux support. Or when a game doesn’t work right after an update. Windows is truly bizzare if you haven’t used it for a bit. Like every time i clicked on the windows key, or sometimes, seemingly randomly when i opened a new windows, it opened the xbox game launcher, or whatever it’s called. I never installed it obviously. I couldn’t really find it, because i uninstalled everything that had the name xbox in it.i “had” to watch a video on how to disable something that i didn’t install and didn’t want in the first place.
They will shove ads into our faces at every possible opportunity. Ads work, they effectively brainwash you, the more you see, the better they do.
And everywhere you go there’s prompts and alerts to upgrade your OneDrive storage or subscribe to Xbox game pass.
Don’t even get me started on the experience on handhelds. Microsoft’s attempts so far at the Xbox Full Screen experience convinces me they will never get it right.
I can ignore them just fine since I am no longer using Windows.
I haven’t used Windows for more than 10 years and I’m happy too.
I think it’s worth repeating that Ubuntu has been available since 2005 (20 years now) and from the start it filled the needs of most users at home (i.e. watching crap on YouTube and using LibreOffice). Most users I have seen around me only have basic requirements and should have switched decades ago.
TL;DR: if you complain about your computer nowadays and don’t play games, install Ubuntu or Mint or anything else, I don’t care anymore.
Even playing games on Linux is much better now thanks to Steam. Never a better time to change. I want my next phone to have Ubuntu Touch as well. Fuck the horrible Google/Apple ecosystem.
This might interest you https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder
Amusingly, I’ve seen that, and I’ve also considered the similarly named Volla phone built by the Germans. You can have Ubuntu Touch as well as their own Android-based VollaOS.
damn that looks great. I can’t wait to get a decent linux phone!
Since the rise of proton gaming is now absolutely viable on Linux as well. The exclusive use cases for Windows are disappearing fast.
Shoutout to the crew at Lutris for their gaming platform as well. I play Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online with it, and couldn’t be more pleased with the performance.
Because my games library is much bigger in GoG than Steam, I’ve been using Lutris alongside the Steam App from the start (for over a year now) and the rate of no-hassle success I’ve had is just as good as with Steam and the whole process of installing a game from GoG and running it is just as slick in Lutris as doing so for Steam games in the Steam App.
Further, Lutris is much more open and flexible than Steam, so for example I’ve configured it to by default run my games inside a firejail sandbox with localhost-only networking, I can install games from many sources and formats rather than just digital distribution from a specific game store and it’s even perfectly possible to run pirated games with it (one of my Steam games won’t at all run in Linux, but a pirated version of it works just fine from Lutris), none of which is possible with Steam.
The actual gaming is just as seamless with Steam as with Lutris, but Steam is purposefully a closed solution highly integrated with a single games store, so it’s way more restrictive about what you can do with your games than Lutris (which follows the open source ethos, up to and including having a ton of obscure configuration options)
Adobe has entered the chat
Edit: I guess you can use Adobe on Mac so it isn’t an example of windows exclusivity. They are what’s keeping me from going 100% to Linux, though
There is only a subset of Windows games left that does not run on Linux. Mostly games with kernelbased Anti-Cheat and a few other outliers. I’ve been gaming exclusively on Linux for years now. Have a look at the ProtonDB website to see if your favourite games are running on Linux
AAA games from around the 00s and 10s with heavy DRM are also often a problem, with the official version of a game not at all running in Linux no matter what you do, whilst a pirate version of the same game will work just fine.
Not questioning you, but curious to hear some examples since this hasn’t been my experience.
You can play almost any game on Linux these days. Often runs better than on Windows
I know we’re all eager to rag on Windows, but can we not act as though Ubuntu is a flawless replacement?
My tech-savvy mother and software engineering spouse have both tried switching to Ubuntu but ultimately switched to Windows and ChromeOS because of the constant errors and unreliability of Ubuntu. Everything from ambiguous “problem detected” messages at startup to terrible video performance and a lack of basic functionality out of the box like DPI settings per display or clipboard history. Even the most basic interaction with display settings cause Ubuntu to go haywire.
I’m well aware that Ubuntu can be customized, but I wish I could say it’s designed for daily use by the same demographic as Windows or Mac. Unfortunately, it’s really not.
I’ve been playing games on [K]Ubuntu just for almost a decade now. There are no excuses, and haven’t been for a long time.
I’ve never used Windows - apart from new workplace requiring it. I largely not see it, unless corporate IT screws up.
Even corporate IT suffers. At my job, we have to apply updates pretty quickly. If Microsoft pushes a bad update, it’ll probably affect a lot of us. Or when they add a new feature like Copilot, they ship it without any administrative controls to turn it off.
I won’t deny it’s godawful to have shit split across AD, Group Policy, Regedit, and Azure/Entra/Intune.
But they very much still have controls for all this shit, almost always available before the feature rolls out. I’ve literally never seen this shit make it through to our end user devices in an un-intended fashion.
Hell, just hold non-security updates for a period of time for review before pushing it to your entire environment if this (not actually happening) issue is a concern. That’s like basic table stakes for Windows environment administration: update cadence management and pilot machines.
Please don’t claim to speak from a place of authority on this and then spread falsehoods. There’s plenty of shit to hate without making things up.
Like the third party app approvals in Azure and Teams defaulting to allow any non-admin user to be able to approve any azure app access to all of their data with no oversight. You can (and should) lock that the fuck down. It’s a batshit default, not a lack of controls.
That’s what I heard from the guys managing group policy in my org. It’s been several years since I did any group policy admin.
I also remember something about Teams pushing features without control. Maybe it was when they started letting users create teams groups.
they ship it without any administrative controls to turn it off.
I thought one of the saving grace of windows corporate was having finer control?
The problem is Microsoft is trying to push the corporate environment away from on-prem infrastructure and into the cloud. There is less and less you can do from Active Directory and Group Policy, more and more of it gets moved to InTune everyday.
Microsoft is pushing Azure Arc as well, which is intended to let you manage your on-prem resources using your cloud management interfaces.
I don’t know what this guy is smoking. Copilot had administrative controls before it rolled out, through Intune and Group Policy.
I can ignore it because I don’t have any of these issues. Haven’t read a single article in the last year or two that bitched about Windows problems I’ve seen IRL.
Consumers are what, less than 10% of MS’s revenue? Most of their income is from cloud (Azure, O365) so they can afford to treat their consumer customers like trash. They don’t give a shit about your 50-150 bucks for a win license because it’s peanuts to them.
The only viable option for consumers is to massively ditch MS products altogether and migrate to alternatives, which used to be in short supply but luckily aren’t anymore.
It’s probably less for OEMs, right? Most people don’t install their own OS, much less pay full price for a license.
And yeah, consumer Windows could disappear and MS wouldn’t care, as long as office computers are still stuck with it. Which they are.
I had Windows 11 on my Asus ROG Ally that I was too lazy to remove. Bitlocker locked the system randomly and would not accept the recovery key from my Microsoft Account.
I installed Bazzite the next day.
I detest this company for many reasons, it’s like they go out of their way to make dealing with them as painful as possible.
Here’s just one example I discovered today. I have a Windows 10 VM I needed to upgrade to 11 but the “PC Health Check” app says no, the i5 processor isn’t supported.
I can, however, create a new VM and install 11 on the exact same hardware, so that’s what I did, along with a whole bunch of extra work to get the new VM set up the same as the old Windows 10 VM was.
Why? Because fuck you, that’s why.
Assholes.
This is how i feel about 98% of Azure. Its just so needlessly complicated, with incomprehensible defaults, and out of date documentation, and APIs that just fail silently.
So much this. I actually pulled all of our servers from Azure and went back to a regular provider. Way cheaper as well.
There is a way to upgrade directly. I got this from Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/1afu0uj/is_it_safe_to_install_windows_11_on_my_microsoft/
It works fine - you just won’t get the more advanced security features available in more recent laptops.
- Boot up into Windows 10
- ensure you have 30GB free space
- Download the .iso: https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11
- right-click the .iso and select “mount” to create a virtual DVDROM
- create a new folder on your main system drive and copy all the files from the virtual DVDROM
- start a command-prompt
- navigate to the folder where you copied all the files
- run the following:
.\sources\setupprep.exe /product server
This will not actually install the server version of windows but will bypass the CPU check so that you can install Win11 on an unsupported CPU. The actual version of Windows installed will depend on the version of Win10 you have: Pro, Home, or Enterprise, for example.
Thank you for this. I already did a fresh install but it’s interesting that your link is to the Surface subreddit just to rub some more salt in the wound. The processor is officially supported for upgrades only if it’s in Microsoft’s hardware. I hate them so much.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. Since I was trying to update my surface. I’ve also installed Linux on it. Which runs a lot faster on the older Surface Nook 1 harder.
You can also flash a usb stick with rufus, mint needs 4GB IIRC.
/j
I prefer Fedora. Tried mint and hated it.
As a neophyte to all those distros out there but still curious, any specific reason?
Is that an upgrade or a fresh install?
It will upgrade an existing install. I did it on my surface and all my files and settings were kept.
Have you tried creating a new VM and attaching your existing vhdx or whatever to it?
I just went for a new installation. Why would that work? Just curious.
It sounds like your VM config was presenting a COU or TPM config that the upgrade wasn’t comfortable with. If your new machine presented acceptable configs to a brand new VM, then making a new VM and feeding it the old .vhdx would be the same as pulling a storage device and putting it in a new motherboard that was win 11 compliant. After a reboot to install new drivers it probably would have upgraded happily.
Hmm, the only barrier to upgrading was that the i5 processor wasn’t supported, no complaints about TPM/motherboard compatibility and a fresh install worked fine on the exact same hardware. Oh well, it’s done anyway.
The hypervisor doesn’t necessarily present the guest the exact CPU you’re running. Maybe it was presenting an older model, or something stripped down that didn’t have the features win 11 was looking for. It’s moot.now that you found a solution but I believe this is what happened and moving the disks to a new VM probably would have worked.
The tech bros are turning everything to shit so you don’t notice any one thing is shit because it’s all shit now. Genius
This generation of software companies really seem to have abandoned all previous goals for “Let’s see how shit we can make this!”
“Sir, if we can finish our robot it could help with any household chores and even take over most of the care work for the elderly. Then in future patches we could make it waterboard the user unless they get the waterboardless premium subscription. Then we’ll increase the cost and slowly reintroduce waterboarding even for subscribers.”
You are now VP of product development at Microsoft. Congratulations.
P.S. Get a bullet proof vest and car.
Doesn’t stop a homemade drone and a fragmentation payload. Or for that matter, a rigged car or location.
You are now VP of product development at Alphabet. Congratulations.
P.S. Entrance details to your bunker will be sent shortly via seperate means.
This guy assassinates.
Zac Bowden used to post a video for every single new insider build of Windows to cover any change he could, he’s bought the original Surface table from 2007, he’s been covering and championing all things Windows for at least a decade. To get someone like him off side, you really gotta be fucking the dog.
Yep.
I started using windows as a kid (Win 3.1). Was more or less happy to be a windows user through all of the various versions, although 95, XP and 7 were the most usable.
For the first time in about 35 years, I’m genuinely unhappy with Windows and am looking at other options.
They’ve really dropped the ball if users like me are unhappy.
Come to CachyOS!
It’s like everything I’ve ever wanted from an OS served on a silver platter.
Look, I’ve used Cachy. It’s great, pretty polished, looks nice.
But do not recommend an arch distro like that until you know person is more tech inclined.
Because a lot of Windows users are not, and they’re not going to want to open the terminal.
Cachy is best for those who like to more effortlessly tinker with their system, like messing around with Polkit so KDE doesn’t ask for a password every second.
Don’t forget, it’s not about what we’ve always wanted from an OS, but what the other person might want from an OS. When unknown, pick the simpler solutions, like Bazzite, Debian, or Mint.
That’s how I’ve gotten 8 people converted to Linux from Windows this year.
It’s unusable and they vibe coded the entire thing.
We had to switch back to windows 10 at work due to the issues we had with 11. Now my computer is permanently broken with many default applications that simply do not work and my IT department can’t figure it out.
Wow, this is astounding. I don’t love windows, but last time I used it it was at least reliable enough that you could work on it with little problems. If they lose that, then there’s little more value that windows still brings to the table, except software which is only developed for windows.
The real issue is that they pulled Windows 10. When Vista was shit, you could use XP until 7 was released, when 8 was shit, you could use 7 until 10 was released. Now 11 is the only supported version and you have no choice if you’re for some reason stuck with Windows.
I have been very successful at ignoring Windows for quite some time.
Turns out, there were a lot of users, primarily gamers, who were considering giving Linux a chance. Microsoft gave them the push they needed.
Steam should get some credit for working on improving its proton integration.
Valve certainly put in the lion’s share of effort in making Linux a hospitable environment for gamers. Without their hard work, the rise in popularity of Linux simply wouldn’t be possible, and I had no intention of belittling that.
Valve made sure there were life rafts. Microsoft provided the iceberg.
Frankly I’ve never had any issues running Windows 11. It’s just the OS in the background for me. I think the biggest difference is I always run Enterprise versions (not Pro or Home) and most of that crap is either non-existent, disabled by default or easy to disable via GPO.
The big thing for people to realize is that Enterprise is the version most all businesses (especially large ones) run, and Microsoft isn’t going to crap on them as easily. And they know by extension, people will run what their business is, but they can get away with making Pro and Home crappier since it’s just individuals who would switch, not large swaths.
Pro and Home is where they test-market the worst of the garbage… some of it does make it into Enterprise - a surprising amount has gotten into Office 365 - but, yeah, not enough to make it completely dysfunctional.
My company (130,000 employees) sticks to 24H2. IT wouldn’t approve the 25H2. Don’t know whether the refusal to upgrade hurts Microsoft in any way, but if it does, I think we’re big enough to be on their radar, and perhaps they talk to our IT about concerns and complaints we may have.
This is the issue I have with people talking about how “you MUST always run the most up to date software”. They don’t understand that in large enterprise it is common for function and security to not update unless there is a damn good reason. The very idea that the newest version is the best is just marketing brainwashing and does not hold up to the reality of use.
25H2 is a feature update. 24H2, for now, gets all the same security fixes. When people say “always run the latest” they mean stay on a supported OS and always have as many security updates as possible within reason.
And they are laughably wrong. Its always the wannabe system admins with 4 end users spouting that nonsense. You get into any big organization and legacy becomes a larger and larger part of the way things are kept running. Hell just for shits and giggles look at the back end of blood banks, government, airports and non blood banks back end infrastructure. I would be shocked if anything was running on less then a decade old software. Hell people think that software hardened over years should just be tossed out the window because the company (who has now made it clear they don’t even know what they are doing) released a version with a bigger number.
Just what are they teaching these days? No OS is secure, exploits and vaunrabilitys are in them all. This should not be a hot take but all I see is lazy it departments offloading responsibly left and right. The correct way to handle this has always been from a risk management approach. You need to assume your not ever secure, make backups, develop a plan to recover after an event and if you have sensitive data handle it like it was sensitive. Now a days we have usernames and passwords stored in the same databases, plain text critical data, lack of redundancy at all levels and a slick sales package to justify it all.
You get into any big organization and legacy becomes a larger and larger part of the way things are kept running. Hell just for shits and giggles look at the back end of blood banks, government, airports and non blood banks back end infrastructure. I would be shocked if anything was running on less then a decade old software.
Maybe on the backend or specialized single purpose appliances. Running decade old OS’s on workstations is negligence boardering on malpractice.
Ha, Welp. I don’t think you want to look then.
I literally work for a government agency lol what you’re saying is nonsense. If they worked the way you’re describing the compliance guys heads would explode and federal agencies would be brought in to oversee upgrades for the next decade
I worked in hospital payments, they used gcc 4.4 in 2023 (but renamed 4.8 for some reason), no TLS, code is 30+ years old. Only impacts a bunch of millions of people.
But having access to the server? No no IT cannot let you have that :-D
Fascinating and a bit of scary.
Eh, its only scary if you don’t see how bad a new roll out normally goes. Software is a tool, and people should remember that.
But yes hospitals are the worst for legacy systems (even outside of the us). I still remember having to relearn how to fix dot matrix printers because the hospital still was using them and had them under contract in 2015.
So Microsoft is so diversified, 130K isn’t even a drop to them. We had almost 200K seats of E3 and when I calculated out the revenue from our EA vs their total revenue, it came up to something like 0.012%. Even though it was tens of millions of dollars on our end, we’re still a drop in the bucket to them.
I had a few issues with 25H2 on release, but they’re largely fixed now.
24H2 and 25H2 are the same thing, it’s just enabling a few different changes. But things like the new obnoxiously ugly start menu have started showing on my 24H2 machines so I don’t really know what the difference is.
Lol its amazing how Noone in the real world knows that microsoft makes OS’s without all the enshitification shit in them that run decent, dont block features from being disabled, are all around non-infuriating piles of shit like the non-enterprise versions, charge an arm and a leg for it. Then microsoft (or at the same time didnt mean one before the other) releases the functionally identical OS versions but so facefucked full of enshitification shit they constantly break, these versions hold you down with an update pistol in your mouth that tells you inorder to live you will update every fucking shitstorm we tell you to, it rapes yo wife, rapes yo kids, ignores all bugs calling them features, all the while having a bomb strapped to their chest that says you dont accept everything we ruin of yours we blow your whole fucking system sky high. And those versions they call Home and Pro versions.
How do you get this? My company has the Enterprise version, but when they forced me to switch to a new Windows 11 laptop (same model and specs as my old one which couldn’t be upgraded to Windows 11 for some reason), it came with all the crap in the article. Ads in the start menu and everything.
Thank you! Lemmy is a bunch of people bitching about their brand name laptop running a garbage version of Windows and loaded with factory crapware.
But hey, they get to come here and comment smugly about Linux. Meanwhile, I haven’t read a single article talking about an issue I’ve actually seen, at home or office.
Which is, by the way, totally ok. If you buy an expensive computer and it is getting shipped with a garbage version of an OS that is something to complain about. It’s also totally reasonable to complain that there is a garbage version at all. People shouldn’t need to reinstall their brand new computers with pirated enterprise versions to escape the abuses of Microsoft. At least let us bitch about this here, dude!
Pirated? You may not be aware, but you can download Windows ISOs straight from Microsoft. The second you boot your machine and register it, the license is permanent and you can install Windows forever.
You have a license for some crappy Win11 home version. You can’t use it for the Enterprise versions, even if Microsoft is providing you with the ISO.
If retail laptops came with enterprise or the upgrade to enterprise was free or the home and pro versions had the same minimal crapware as enterprise then you might have a point.
But that isn’t the case and Linux is still free and not full of shit so the smugness is mostly justified and you’re mostly wrong.
-
Register your new laptop.
-
Wipe and reinstall an official ISO from Windows without the crapware.
-
Best served tweaked with some PowerShell scripting.
or
-
Download your Linux ISO and install
-
Best served tweaked with CLI work to get everything working. If the drivers are even available.
-
Are you upset at people criticizing Microsoft? Is that the point you are trying to make?
I was criticizing MS before most of lemmy was fucking born. But can you see what I’m saying?
“Never had these issues, not once.”
Lemmy: “Fuck you! Yes you have! You’re not in our tribe!” (Also lemmy: Only idiot conservatives defend their tribe no matter what.)
Can you see how insane that is from my perspective? Installed Windows 10 on this SSD 8-years ago. Moved that SSD through 3 or 4 PCs and upgraded to 11, no problems.
Then there was a very similar thread about people trying to switch to Linux:
“As soon as I get $basic_driver working, I can finally switch!”
Been running Linux servers for 20-years. I never use MS unless there’s a compelling reason, IIS or some bullshit. But the Linux desktop is still a clusterfuck.
“It’s awesome if you use $distro with $desktop! You’ll have problems with $x, $y and $z, but you can fix that by [command line work].”
“OK. I can make Windows go with a base ISO and some PowerShell. No ads, no horseshit, start menu is flawless.”
“Look at this idiot that has to use a CLI to make his OS work!”
These people are like atheists that just learned you don’t have to believe in god.
You just come off as unusually worked up about the Microsoft criticisms is why I ask.
Its not even a lemmy thing exclusive either. From reddit to youtube there’s been lot of criticism of the direction of consumer Windows 11 that there’s people providing guides now on getting LTSC.
I used windows since 3.1 up till 11. It’s dogshit after windows 7 even when I use cmd scripts to limit telemetry and customize it because MS with their infinite wisdom decided to revert my customizations to their default dogshit.
Linux is not perfect at all but Id rather dealing with linux issues over greedy executive decisions to cause issues intentionally.
With Linux systems we never(?) have to deal with defaults decided by the profit motive. The computer might not instantly do everything I want but I don’t have to fight a multinational corporation as part of the solution. That’s what swung it permanently for me. I’m not in corporate IT but as a fixer of hundreds of people’s personal computers over decades, Windows is horrific and nowadays I have started just refusing to become responsible for trying to sort it out, even for pay.
It’s dogshit after windows 7
Lol
Not only were there several dogshit windows versions before 7, 8 was an upgrade in almost every way other than “omg start menu big now” culture shock. The new task manager alone was worth having a slightly bigger start menu.
I still use ME. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
You poor thing
Time for Nadella to take responsibility for these fuck ups and resign already.
CEOs taking responsibility for their actions? In the Usa?!?!
