Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:46 Sponsor: TuxCare Radar
02:23 Windows 11 is failing right now
05:20 What’s the job of an OS?
06:51 Updates break systems. Often.
10:53 You have to adapt to it
15:14 It’s highly intrusive
17:44 Debloating tools don’t make it good
20:19 Windows fails at being an OS
21:33 Alternatives are better, but not perfect
27:23 Windows is a sales platform, not an OS
Yep, been over a year now on Linux, I’ll never go back.
About a year and a half ago I got a laptop to prepare for moving countries. Figured “I’ll probably distro hop a bit see what I like so let’s start pretty plain with Arch”. I’ve uh never distro hopped, Arch my beloved, great daily driver does exactly what I tell it to
My issue with Arch is all the other stuff it installs when installing packages. It is annoying.
I have to use it for work, and the difference between how my work laptop and my personal laptop (Debian 43) handles basic tasks is stark.
The stuff like “will my headphones work?” has been solved for years at this point. I’m talking even more basic, like rendering the UI and loading menus.
you know what’s funny, is that my noise cancelling headphones started to have serious problems when I ‘upgraded’ to windows 11. it would pick up the noise cancelling mics and decide they were the primary, not my standalone dedicated microphone.
in the process, it would also downgrade the sound quality for some fucking reason. no matter how many ways I disabled them, it would either re-enable them or I’d find a new way to try.
with Linux? just works.
100%. I’m not quite as ardently anti-Windows as most on this community from a UI/UX standpoint, but both Bluetooth and audio device switching are genuinely terrible experiences in Windows. I find myself pairing audio devices from scratch all the time on my work laptop, and it’s painful every time.
Ehh their UI sucks moving copy and paste from the right click menu to the top of the right click menu as icons sucks.
“will my headphones work?”
It was Linux the one you had to check if basic peripherals would work.
Now it is windows the one that gives issues with headphones, the one in charge of the equipment at my office is fed up with all of the complaints related to windows and headphones (the ones provided by the employer and the personal ones).
Last Friday windows decided to stop working with the laptop’s webcam, and it was stuck as in use despite even turning off the camera in setttings.
All our work Teams calls are colleagues swearing because their Bluetooth is messed up, or Windows changed their default audio device (again)
You still will run into issues with certain Bluetooth headphones on Linux because they either need proprietary codecs that just aren’t available or fall back to really shitty ones. Not Linux’ fault, but users will only see (or hear) that it doesn’t work properly.
Examples you have noted, sir; for awareness’ sake.
I’d have to ask, they weren’t mine. But part of the problem was that it’s either high latency and no mic or very low quality both ways, neither very usable for video conferencing. Was fine on Windows. I’m sure their Thinkpad’s shitty Mediatek Bluetooth module didn’t help either.
What is the future like? knowing the slow cadence of debian you must be from the very far future.
I know this is a Linux space, and I love Linux but my Windows 11 box runs just fine. I haven’t had any problems with it.
Then you’re lucky. Win11 virtually pushed me to Linux, I was a windows fanboy before.
I’m not a fanboy, I just use whatever works
No, I was a windows fanboy. Just wanted to emphasise, that even someone as loyal as me got pushed away.
It’s all good
Windows 10 was the last actual Microsoft OS.
I disagree. For me it was Win 7. And even in retrospective I’d say the last truly good and clean system was XP. I had to use it at work a month ago to troubleshoot a system and was surprised how well designed XP was for its time – and still is tbh
I think the general consensus is that windows XP was the last clean and well put together microsoft os that’s the rounded cleaner version of windows 2000.
When windows 7 came out I downgraded back to XP, which with the new file system it’s nearly impossible to pull off. I can’t downgrade anything windows 10 and above and I’d have windows xp partitioned if I could.
This year alone I had to reinstall 3 Windows systems that were failing to work. Then again, my Windows 11 work laptop also seems to work just fine.
Well that sucks. I hope everything keeps running from now on.
Do you work supporting users with windows 11? Print servers? Azure policies?
Windows 11 sucks big donkey dick
They’re isn’t one positive thing to say about it at all. Not even one.
Sure there is: Sometimes it doesn’t boot. And nobody can deny that it’s been great for driving linux adoption!
Of course there is. It’s compatible with almost any software and hardware (if you ignore their arbitrary W11 “requirements” which you can in most cases) that you can get your hands on. Microsoft and Windows deserve most of the flack they’re getting, but we should be honest.
Take Linux as a comparison. Compatibility is pretty good nowadays and is only getting better, especially with all the work going into Proton from both Valve and the community. But certain things are simply not supported which can make it either difficult or straight up impossible to get to work. Not that Linux is to blame for that, of course, but it is reality.
if you ignore their arbitrary W11 “requirements” which you can in most cases
No we cannot. I have a perfectly capable gaming machine, which meets my needs perfectly yet it’s not supported by Windows. It’s not some old work laptop a fricking gaming machine.
I didn’t mean it in a philosophical or ethical sense. Yes, their formal W11 requirements are stupid, but you can literally ignore them.
Some of the requirements are just there on paper and the installer will let you continue regardless. And the rest can be disabled by flashing the ISO with Rufus and toggling that option on. Yes, this risks you not getting updates in the future and may affect certain (not very important) functions, but you absolutely can ignore the requirements if you want to, and as far as I know no one has been denied support so far.
The depths you have to sink to to get what honestly feels like an attempt at a charity point, but if that wasn’t assumed it wouldn’t have become the product in its position.
If there was an actual push to get compatibility worked out, it very well could. Seems more like a corporate holdback than a technical issue.
Almost any software or hardware? Better to phrase it as almost all desktop software
Well yes, but this whole thread is about Windows 11 which is a desktop OS, so I thought that went without saying.
Oh did you forget server and embedded?
There’s one thing Windows does that I miss. The big preview pane in file explorer.
Maybe it’s because I neutered my W11 and only dual boot to launch the occasional game or Windows specific driver, but… I haven’t had significant issues with W11? Not that I can remember over the past two years.
No broken updates, no weird copilot things, no excessive background usage, nothing. The only maintenance I do is manually updating graphics drivers.
It wastes none of my time.
The one issue I had was the LG monitor debacle, that tried to install Mcafee, but that was LG’s fault (and I’m never, ever buying an LG display again, as long as I live. I hope you’re happy, LG marketing).
I find this remarkable, because to me it means, Windows doesn’t have to be junk, yet they deliberately configure it that way, and make it extremely difficult to undo. I used a slew of tools neuter it, but I’d have no idea where to start without them.
And to be clear, I use Linux 90% of the time, so I’m not advocating for Windows or anything.
Maybe it’s because I neutered my W11 and only dual boot to launch the occasional game or Windows specific driver
Yes, it’s that. If you’d use it as your daily driver, you would notice. I do tech support at work and there’s hardly a month that goes by without a Win 11 machine sitting on my desk that has - miraculously! - fucked-up drivers or other issues after an “update”.
Windows updates the computer and I swear my ram speed went down.
I have experienced all of that on my work machine. Its a mess of breakage and glitches and background stalls. Group policy initially stopped copilot but now its back again… And its always just enough to mess up your mouse flow
I think a lot of the issues people experience on windows can be mitigated by disabling certain things or as you said “neutering” it. Back when I used windows 10 as my main OS, I did a lot of modification to make it better and it was alright, but windows 11 has also experienced a lot more bugs and criticism just being generally worse. Worse resource management, less user freedom, more tracking, more ai, newer CPU requirements, and that’s all just off the top of my head.
a lot of the issues people experience on windows can be mitigated by disabling certain things or as you said “neutering” it.
Wouldn’t it be great if an operating system just worked properly out-of-the-box?
There are Arch distributions that do that better than Windows 11. What’s Microsoft’s excuse?
Preaching to the choir man. I ditched Windows and am better for it. No excuse for microslop to be this bad.
Any neutering tool recommendations?
Honestly I don’t know which projects are up to date, so I’m afraid to recommend what I vaguely remember.
Search GitHub/Gitlab for “windows debloat” or similar concepts, and sort the results by date updated (e.g. the most recent commit). This is precisely what I’d do with a fresh Windows install, anyway.
On top of that, I go through running services one by one and disable the ones I don’t need.
I disable Defender active protection (except for the firewall/anti tamper) as well, as it absolutely tanks the performance of many applications. As one example I measured, it multiplies the startup time for modded Rimworld, and dramatically slows game ticks. It seems to slow Cyberpunk 2077 as well, but not as reproducibly.
Most “debloaters” won’t do this, as it’s generally not a good idea. But I treat my Windows partition as disposable: nothing sensitive stored, no sensitive data accessible on drives nor networks, data on a separate partition. If it was infected, I could wipe it and reinstall without a care.
There’s a good one called Ubuntu.
I mean, yeah. Though that’s less recommended these days. I run Debian on proxmox for different server needs. And my laptop is fedora bluefin.
Desktop, as infrequently used as it is, still runs Windows for the few times a year when I absolutely need Windows on bare metal. Plus I keep a Windows 10 VM on the server for the one every month or two that I need it. Try as I might to get away from windows, when you’re part of a team, and the only one running Linux, sometimes you get weird incompatibilities, and you just need to do it on Windows 🤦♂️
I would be careful with any “neutering” tools then, depending on your work, because some can mess with Teams, CoPilot, or whatever else you need. Check the options before you run the tools.
Windows Store apps like Teams work fine for me, though, as do IDEs.
Can I trademark Sloperating System?
It failed. It’s not failing. The fact that it’s still widely used doesn’t make it successful.
I’m a linux user but this is so cringe.
windows in general has always been a failure. I love how now I can solve most problems
So I am a linux user, but use Windows 11 for work. I am an accountant in the school system.
Windows works fine for my work purposes. Especially when a lot of applications are being removed for web clients. I still use quite a bit of desktop applications, but I see the writing on the wall; soon all my work can be done on any device.
When the desktop application in work spaces finally die, I am curious if industries will switch to linux since its free and can be run on any hardware essentially. That or maybe owners will force their workers to use their own devices (phones, like Samsung DeX) to do work.
Always has been
except for the embedded license revenues the multitudes keep paying.
I think they made it shitty on purpose so they can roll out a subscription based windows 12 which would be slightly better than 11.
Why would people running Linux even care about the success/failure of Windows 11?
It’s a nice circle jerk, but it has way more market share than Linux (at least on desktop, which y’know it’s a desktop OS), so by that measure it is a “success”.
You have to really stretch to some abstract definition of success to call it a failure.
It’s a market success and a performance failure. Not much of a stretch of any definition.
Version 11 didn’t make that market share happen. It inherited that from win XP
Yes, all those XP machines kept upgrading…
No, the actual market share of Windows 11 specifically, even against other Windows OS’s, far surpasses Linux.
Capitalist brain.