this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024

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Microsoft Ruined Windows (www.youtube.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Microsoft is ruining Windows. It just keeps getting worse. Whether it be their insistence on AI and cloud garbage, or just a general sense of incompetence, I can’t help but feel like the operating system has seen better days.

Normally I wouldn’t care too much, big tech ruins another thing, whatever.

But the problem is Microsoft has such a dominant market share that you can’t really escape them.

I guess unless you use a Mac or something I don’t know.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Microsoft Windows is heavily marketed and, for most of the general public that aren't aware of Linux, is a cheaper option compared to Apple/Mac/iOS.

I worked with/on Windows for two decades. Through those years I became more and more frustrated with the bugs and vulnerability to outside attacks. Windows is going to be attacked more, and for other reasons, because it is used by more people (a greater attack surface to exploit).

Back in 2008 I switched to Apple/Mac/iOS. I have never regretted it.

IF you have the time/knowledge (which most of the general public doesn't have) to use Linux, then I'd recommend it.

Please, stop with this 'fan-boy' shit about operating systems. Use logic and rational thinking which I believe that I've shown above.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's important to note that opting into the Apple ecosystem locks you out of any form of agency on your hardware. They've moved hard against repairability and they maintain a stranglehold on spare parts.

For that reason I prefer my personal desktop computer to be a PC I can open, maintain or upgrade myself in terms of hardware. The operating system is my choice as well.

I understand not everybody has the means or interest to tinker with their machine, but I still think Apple's business practices regarding hardware is wasteful and polluting.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I understand and completely agree from someone who is knowledgeable about this subject matter. However, MOST people are NOT. To clarify again, (and this is something that is getting very annoying to repeat over and over again) the general public have almost NO knowledge about the differences between operating systems.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Honestly, there are low-touch/low-fuss distributions that exist that can be installed with some assistance from a more techy person in one's life.

But I will admit that Apple is more usable across the board.

However, not everyone can really afford the extra cost of an Apple system; which genuinely does require re-buying a lot of other devices in order to get basic compatibility.

For some, yes, Apple does solve the problem. For others, Linux can be accessible and easy to use; particularly if hardware being used is older, and the workflows are common enough.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I recently reset a laptop with Windows 11 on it, prior to installing Linux, and went through the setup process again. It is so bad now, the offline account option was completely missing and it was constantly trying to push Microsoft services on me. It felt very reminiscent of how freeware installations often try to trick users into accepting additional third party garbage.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

FWIW, you can still press Shift-F10 to open a command prompt, then run oobe\bypassnro. The computer will reboot / restart the setup process and this time there'll be a small link "I don't have internet" that'll allow you to set up a local account.
Just make very sure not to connect it to the internet (cable or Wi-Fi) before this point.

There have been rumours of newer versions of Windows 11 not allowing the bypass anymore, but I haven't personally seen any evidence of this so far.

Still a shit show though - trickery like this shouldn't be necessary.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago

Hi, try Linux Mint.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Switch to Linux. I did it a few months ago and I have zero complaints, even in gaming.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I wish I didn't multibox. Linux is perfectly fine for essentially every other use case,

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

By multiboxing, you mean running multiple instances of the same mmo client so you can control multiple characters at once? I'm curious what issues you run into doing this in Linux.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

multiple proton compatibility layers eat up system resources real quick and last time I attempted it they kept eating until everything was chugging at frames per minute.

Linux also does this thing called minimize on focus loss that is horrid for this (and the canned fix doesn't work for me so don't bother, maybe it's a PopOS specific thing) also alt-tabing doesn't see game clients anyway only the game launcher so that little piece of muscle memory from the past 2 decades can put you in a situation or two.

Also the preview/switching tool isn't available, which wouldn't be a deal breaker if alt-tabbing worked properly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Ahh, yeah proton overhead would add up. I wonder if there's a way to run a single proton instance that launches all of them. When I was running the wow launcher via bottles, I believe it was running both the launcher and the client it spawned using the same resources.

And yeah, I've almost never had the minimize on lost focus issue, but I've mostly used tiling WMs. The cursor getting locked to the window bounds is way more common.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Windows have always been trash. Windows 9x were the worse.

Windows NT was better, Windows XP was trash at release then got better with updates (the service packs).

Windows Vista was a shitshow, then 7 was better. Windows 8 was horrible, the 10 was a bit better.

Windows always oscillates between trash and acceptable. There is not much to "ruin" to be honest.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ive been hearing this since 1995

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

how was w95 enshittified relative to w3?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

It wasn't. It was simply better. That was the trend all the way through to Windows 7, with a few bumps along the way. Then things went downhill.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Vista was a nightmare 8 was awful

Windows has consistently released 1 good, 1 bad for a long time now.

The thing is I think win11 is terminal. It's just forever windows because they can milk it for ads without needing to iterate.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Vista's problem was just the terrible third party drivers and the fact that it was preinstalled on machines it had no business running on. 7 didn't improve much on it (except fixing the UAC prompt so that it no longer made you feel like you're using Linux with misconfigured sudo timeout), but it had the benefit of already having working drivers from Vista and proper hardware capable of running Vista/7.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

7 was actually surprisingly well optimized. It ran OK on an office PC with 512 MB of RAM and a 512 MHz CPU.

You wouldn't use it like that because by that time apps like browsers and office were starting to feel restricted by that little RAM to the point you could only run either or. But the OS itself stayed out of the way as much as possible, and if you gave it just a little more RAM (like 1 GB) suddenly you had a usable office machine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I ran 7 on a Dell netbook for a few years, and it worked great (though, naturally, not as great as XP)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

In 1995 people thought Win95 was incomprehensible.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I guess unless you use a Mac or something I don’t know.

Yea … you can just use a Mac.

I switched … back in 2006 after being fed up with MS BS. Haven’t looked back. Since then I’ve had 2 laptops. That’s it.

The current one is getting old now, sadly, but part of the trick with Apple is timing your purchases for when they kinda nail the product in the particular design cycle. Don’t buy when they do something new for the first time, aim for near the end of a design cycle generally. And don’t get base specs, add RAM and disk space (perhaps through extended 3rd party devices). And their machines can be very useful for quite a while.

Of course there’s Linux, but you’ll know if you’re ready for that.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

But you only have two kidneys, how will you buy a third Mac?

Macs are outrageously priced for the hardware you get.

Non-Apple laptops can be just as reliable and last just as long nowadays, and you get to upgrade them at a fraction of the cost. Actually I should say you get to upgrade them, period.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Macs are outrageously priced for the hardware you get.

Yea sure, we all know this. But we're talking about software here. Not to be too snarky, but the part you actually use. The differences might not be worth it to you, or maybe you need a gaming PC, but for some, it's just fine.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Linux gaming, console gaming

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's the professional software that keeps people off Linux. Particularly software for art, video and music. Not enough of it has Linux versions or Windows versions that run well enough in Linux. And a lot of people are forced to use Windows for work because that's their company's standard and they use all kinds of Windows-specific software.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Linux for gaming and dev work. MacOS for creative tools.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

My problem is SolidWorks, SpaceClaim, etc. They do not run from my testing in Linux...Later I'll try getting them going in a VM. I just worry about the performance hit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Windows runs faster on a VM under linux than on bare metal

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Can you detail your VM setup? I’ve tried Windows 10 on several occasions using Qemu and VirtualBox and the UI lag has been complete ass, even after installing the driver packages for each VM host.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

To have any chance of doing serious CAD work in a VM you are going to need to set up GPU passthrough so the guest OS can access the GPU directly. AFAIK Virtualbox doesn't do this. Some hints about further research can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPU_virtualization.

I strongly doubt Windows will be faster in a VM, that's a pretty bold claim. But it should be possible to get it to an ok level.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

How can that be? It's the same machine except you have introduced some overhead.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

it's a half truth. a compatibility layer will always be slower than bare metal but main systems tend to get bogged down with excess software and general use. A VM will be optimized for the 1 thing you need to run, and maybe even use a snapshot so it's always the same system at max performance.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

Can't ruin what was already trash, QED

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Arch ftw

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah I am so glad I switched to GNU/Linux years ago, Have to keep supporting closed OSes at work with our software and with each release they are just getting worse and worse, while GNU/Linux just keeps getting better.