this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
578 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
59581 readers
3009 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
That's the problem, it's not your OS.
It's a shame. I really love Windows 10. It's fast and the UI's ergonomy is near perfect.
On my work laptop we recently had to switch to Windows 11 and it's a fucking pain to use. You have to jump through so many hoops and do extra clicks to do what you want. And the start menu has become completely useless. And I hate the gaps and rounded corners everywhere. And that's just on the surface. Performance is piss poor and you have all that crap spying on you to collect your usage data.
The day Windows 10 becomes unsupported is the day I go 100% Linux.
Forced to use it at work, too, and only by the grace of being in the IT department do I have the ability to make it less shitty.
There's registry entries to restore the full context menu, and PowerToys Run has effectively become my defacto start menu, though obviously you need to use the keyboard so it's not a perfect UI replacement. Meanwhile for searching, I've got Everything running and set global keyboard shortcuts/touchpad gestures to it. Maybe I'll grab an old gaming mouse and shortcut them to the extra buttons.
They finally implemented never combine on the taskbar, and it's...tolerable, but buggy and still resizes things for no reason
Unfortunately I've yet to find a way to get some damn 90° angles back. I can not wait for a few years down the line when we finally swing away from this Apple-chasing "bubbles with an inch between them on a white/black field" design aesthetic. I'm tired of everything looking like a toy, especially at the cost of its actual utility.
And not just a toy, the same toy. It's seriously Corporate Memphis levels of lifeless, forced design with no character, creativity, or ingenuity.
I'm a user 🤮 and the IT on my Japanese employer is run by Mordac the Information Preventer. FML.
TIL about PowerToys Run. That’s a game changer for me. Thanks!
This has been exactly my stance as well apart from ever having used Win11. Never did and never plan to, downloaded Mint a few months ago to start getting familiar with it. Turns out I'm not real great at technical stuff but I'm getting there. Dual monitors was kind of a booger and now I'm trying to figure out how to install some games since Bottles is being a real wiener about Battle.Net. I'm glad there's so many resources and forums out there but I still hope some version of Linux gets dumbed down a little more before Win10 sunsets to make the transition easier for us blue collar folk
I had problem with bottles and battle.net too. It went flawless year ago, then I went to play other games and when I finally wanted to play Diablo 2 again, battle.net kept crashing all the time. I solved it by running that bottle in wine-ge. Easier way to get it (and manage such prefixes) is ProtonUp-qt that is also on flathub.
For games, running stuff through Steam makes things much easier, as it configures Proton for you automatically. Also check out https://www.protondb.com/ for ratings and help with specific games.
Steam's been fantastic! Problem for me is that some of the battle.net games aren't on there. If there's a way to download those somewhere and run them through Steam that'd be incredible. I didn't even think to consider searching around for that possibility. I've seen people run Diablo 4 on their Decks so it's clearly possible, I'm just still learning how to troubleshoot Linux and I'm trying to be extra careful since their OS doesn't have much in the way of guardrails to prevent dummies from nuking themselves
Yeah, I will say I have personally found Blizzard games tend to run poorly on Linux. It has mostly lead to me playing less Blizzard games. I have more games than I can possibly ever play, I don't need to bang my head against a wall for a specific one. Though, it has also helped their sequels have been less-good than their prior games. Starcraft 2 wasn't as good as Starcraft, Diablo 4 just never appealed like Diablo 3, I'm now playing more Guild Wars 2 and ignoring WoW, etc etc.
Windows 10 already had telemetry (what you call spying) and what it didn't have in the past got patched in. So when it comes to that both Windows 10 and 11 are the same.
Performance is totally fine for me on Windows 11, but the new right click context menu sucks.
Overall there's really not much difference between the two otherwise.
MS even backported spying to Win7
I've been using Manjaro on an old modded chromebook. Windows is not gonna be on my next machine build.
I think you can use a third-party tool to remove rounded corners
Trust me, I'm not installing Windows as the Operating System for my Children's brains.
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
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
Thanks for updating the link, I forgot!
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.
In Win7 and Win10 I always had my own Toolbar added with a bunch of .rdp, .bat and .ps1 for quick and easy access.
In Win11 that feature is missing. :(
Tiny11 is good too!
Link?
Tiny11 Archive Link
In the "ISO Image" dropdown under "Download Options", I recommend the latest build, but that's up to you!
Thanks! I'll have to check it out. I've been waiting for an LTSC version before I tried 11. This might do for now.
Yeah you're welcome! Good good. I only have experience with Tiny10, not Tiny11, but if Tiny10 is anything to go off of, it's a pretty seamless experience.
Yep.
Isn't Tiny11 just LTSC with stuff removed? My Tiny10 VM reports as LTSC.
Mhm.
Been this way since windows XP. There's always been good folk who go out and provide tools to remove bloat.
Quit for what? Linux is a mess with hardware like fingerprint readers being unsupported, and without the most used commercial software. Mac OS is a buggy mess lately, and it ties your data to a time bomb hardware and that damn walled garden.
Windows is the best general use OS out there, and Microsoft knows it. We need regulation to stop that abuse.