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…
Very useful, just like my dedicated Cortana key. 🤡
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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it’s a constant cat and mouse game
It’s not just Microsoft. Never heard of always on DRM? Or government making it difficult for people to receive assistance (disability or homeless)?
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
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
I doubt it. Google will squander it away one way or another. It could work on a technical level, I’ve been using flex since before Google bought it for family members, it’s just poorly advertised and explained.
It’s google, they’ll just stop working on it.
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.
“Started as”
Yeah, no. Yes Xenix was a thing but it would be incorrect to say that it ever was their main product.
I don’t think anyone has ever hinted on that NT has a unix code base except for some “borrowed” networking code from bsd.
it would be incorrect to say that it ever was their main product.
They made several full versions of it… It was not simply a one off product.
While Xenix 2.0 was still based on Version 7 Unix,[30] version 3.0 was upgraded to a Unix System III code base,[12]: 9 [31][32] a 1984 Intel manual for Xenix 286 noted that the Xenix kernel had about 10,000 lines at this time.[10]: 1–7 It was followed by a System V R2 codebase in Xenix 5.0 (a.k.a. Xenix System V).[33]
Also,
Microsoft’s Chris Larson described MS-DOS 2.0’s Xenix compatibility as “the second most important feature”.[38] His company advertised DOS and Xenix together, describing MS-DOS 2.0 (its “single-user OS”) as sharing features and system calls with Xenix (“the multi-user, multi-tasking, Unix-derived operating system”), and promising easy porting between them.[39]
So they were simultaneously created AND interoperable (from a program development perspective). This was a full fledged item.
Edit: to elaborate a little better. If they were simultaneously developed… and interoperable. And one item is Unix-based outright. Then it’s safe to say that the other item (MS-DOS) in this case is also pretty steeped in Unix roots.
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Sounds like an ageist to me. As far as I knew, Microsoft’s first product was msdos but I guess I’m just too unintelligent and “young” (lol) to know better
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.
want your OS
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.
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.
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
If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.
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
Thanks for updating the link, I forgot!
