I recently discovered, while helping a family member, that to unlock Windows from S mode you now need a Microsoft account. This is really crazy: I need a stupid Microsoft account to use my PC.

Without mentioning that the only way to create a local user is to setup windows without connecting it to the internet.

And without mentioning the amount of nagging, ads and spam that Windows users have to withstand. Like, the other day Edge reappeared on my taskbar by itself and reset itself as the default browser. And how many times do I need to confirm that yes, I am not crazy, I want to use another browser?

It’s a pity, because under the crust of shit, there’s a good OS with wonderful software compatibility that spans over decades and that is, overall, quite stable. Too bad it is constantly trying to bother its users.

Windows S mode is a tightly locked down mode that only allows Microsoft Store Apps to be used and only allows Microsoft Edge for a browser. It's basically making your computer like a Windows 10 edition of a Chromebook.

------

I'm all for "you shouldn't need a Microsoft account to use your computer", but if you want to you use the locked down mode that is specifically FOR tight integration with MS's services and limiting you from everything else....needing a Microsoft account seems to make sense.

Why are you using S mode if that's not what you want?

I'm fully aware of what S mode is. A family member bought a 600€ laptop from Dell that came with Windows S. To unlock it and allow said family member to install software that is not on the Microsoft Store (which is to say, any software, really), we had to setup a Microsoft account, as otherwise it was impossible to unlock it. And by the way, I doubt it's anyone's choice to use S mode. It certainly wouldn't be mine.

> we had to setup a Microsoft account, as otherwise it was impossible to unlock it.

Why not boot from a Windows 10 ISO and install Windows Home from there? As an added bonus, it would be a lot cleaner without all of the Dell junkware as well.

It probably wouldn't be anyone's choice, but on the other hand, it's probably many people's non-choice, i.e. people who don't care about or know which OS they use

This, so much. I don't want a Microsoft account, at all, ever. So I entered a bogus email address. Now (almost) every time I log in, it tells me there's a problem with my account that I need to fix...

Free clue for Microsoft: I know you keep wanting to "leverage" your base of Windows installs into more income in other areas. But when you use leverage, your users feel forced. And we don't like it. Stop it. You're pissing off your customers.

Or like the man said, "You can't win, Gates. The more you tighten your grip, the more computer systems slip through your fingers."

(Yes, I'm calling out Gates. It started under him, decades ago.)

> Yes, I'm calling out Gates. It started under him, decades ago.

I’m sure he’s quaking in his boots, former Slashdotter.

Month ago I installed Windows 10 and created a local account while connected to the internet, if I remember correctly it was hidden by 2 or 3 steps. Professional version.

This is correct, but it's only valid for Windows 10 Pro. For Windows 10 Home, being disconnected is the only solution, for now.

Same. No need for the Microsoft account, although it is tricky to find.

Some wonderful mid-brightness blue text on a dark blue background.

Any chance the ADA or similar legislation can be dropped on them for that?

I ran into Windows S when setting up a laptop for my mother. I was hot and pissed that they force you to handover an account/data to use your system. It's clear that the Windows world is out of ideas, and is now looking to move into datamining to maintain revenues. Revenues none of which will be spent on making sure Patch Tuesday doesn't brick and BSOD people's machines.

You have to pick "Work network" or some such thing, meaning you intend to join it to a domain, in order to have the option to create a local account if you've already hooked it to network. This also means it has to be Pro version, Home doesn't have this option.

And OS settings scattered around multiple places (control panel vs settings), forced rebooting every 10min, resetting your default apps regularly, trying to prevent me from creating a local account, and for most of the life of windows 10 a broken start menu (locking for a long time, inconsistent search results), cortana.

I am personally convinced that the windows developers all use macs and are not bothered by these glaring, in your face quality issues.

> resetting your default apps regularly

This is my biggest pain points of windows 10. Why is it OK for windows to change my default image viewer everyday, with the some obscure message "there is a problem with your image viewer, we changed it to preinstalled image viewer from Windows"? Why? My image viewer is running perfectly OK, it has never crashed. I don't understand it at all.

Your image viewer is editing registry keys to set itself as the file extension handler instead of using the correct way - the correct way is to register itself as a new handler so Windows prompts the user whether to change to the new program or not. Trying to make the change by editing registry keys is a pattern used by shady devs to hijack file extensions without user consent, and as s user defence Windows rejects the change and resets the file handlers to default.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170517-00/?p=96...

it's because your preferred image viewer isn't doing what it's supposed to do, and windows is correctly doing what it can to make sure you're using an image viewer that works.

If it wasn’t successfully performing the functions of an image viewer, don’t you think the user would notice?

The user has noticed, and is incorrectly blaming Microsoft for the software’s problems. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27524888

It's not properly boosting usage metrics for first-party Microsoft apps!

I have never encountered a situation with forced reboots every 10 minutes. Do you have any very special hardware that might cause this?

I think this was somewhat hyperbolic, it's not that frequent, but it's still beyond ridiculous.

I run VMs on vmware workstation. Every 2 or 3 days I come in to find the system rebooted during the night. I've tried every knob possible to turn it off to no avail. Updates regularly reset all the power settings so it suspends after 30 minutes.

The lack of control over the machine's basic functioning makes it barely fit for purpose.

I've been running this[0] solution on machines that I need to control the reboot cycle due to long running processes.

It has been working flawlessly for the past two years and has survived multiple feature upgrades.

What it does is override the call to the executable that schedules the reboot using the Windows built in debugging tools.

One line registry patch and the executable is redirected elsewhere.

0: https://lazyadmin.nl/it/how-to-stop-automatic-restart-win-10...

yup - this one kills me too. I'll have multiple VMs/docker images up and running all week and discover my dev machine sitting there with a fresh login prompt. A hard, not scheduled by me, reboot is absolutely unacceptable.

here's the thing, though.

microsoft has watched people in the past NEVER update their operating system for whatever reason. too much of a pain, "no need", can't deal with the outage caused by a reboot, whatever.

microsoft has also been blamed quite voraciously for "insecure" operating systems allowing worms to spread, when patched systems don't even get infected.

so, because MS is damned if they do, and damned if they don't, Microsoft has chosen to "do" and keep people patched up.

oh the horror.

the culture of blaming Microsoft for things that you or your installed applications do is the cause for this attitude Microsoft has about users not knowing what's good for themselves. THEY DON'T KNOW WHATS BEST; Not when it comes to security. We as users have demonstrated this over and over again.

So MS err on the side of caution, and essentially force updates.

and, yes, Microsoft change things, for reason(s) that you are not aware of, because either a new feature requires a change in a supporting subsystem, or because they believe they've discovered a better way to do something, or through extensive user testing they have discovered a better UI paradigm. or maybe just because they want to.

look, things are NEVER going to remain the same from year to year. your "the good old days" were someone else's "this new stuff sucks so much, why did they change it, it was fine" and that will be true so long as humans use things others create.

sometimes the decisions Microsoft makes are good. sometimes they are bad. yes, the correct decision FOR YOU is crystal clear FOR YOU, but guess what? other people exist, and what's best for them is something else.

so the majority get better representation. positively and negatively. I hate many decisions Microsoft has made, and I recognize that there is no way to please everyone. It is amazing to me how many people do not understand this.

(in this entire comment, I am using the royal "you" and I am not talking about any specific individual.)

Maybe they should make an OS that doesn't get pwned if you connect it to the internet when it's two weeks behind on updates. Linux and BSD machines manage it. Remote 0-days don't come by that often.

> Maybe they should make an OS that doesn't get pwned if you connect it to the internet when it's two weeks behind on updates.

do you really believe that they AREN'T working on this? of course they are. the field of software development is extraordinarily young. we still don't know how to do things very well, and we're still discovering new ways to know we aren't doing things well.

> Linux and BSD machines manage it.

it's a matter of target value, and the number of people who would be inconvenienced enough to pay a random to unlock their files on Linux is FAR smaller than for Windows. So attackers go where the money is. Governments overwhelmingly use Windows as a desktop OS as well. Attackers go where the secrets are. etc.

And when you count remote exploits capable of remote code execution, last I read there had been slightly more of those on Linux than Windows. don't quote me on that until I find a source.

> Remote 0-days don't come by that often.

yes they do. not all of them get media attention, though. the most recent monthly patch from MS for Windows 10 included fixes for six of them. All were actively being exploited. SIX.

If we're talking target value, I rather think that servers are higher value than people's desktops - they have lots more juicy info, and richer owners.

I think there is mismatch in publicly here. When private consumer's computers gets hijacked, those kind of stories can show up in normal non-technical newspapers, as a warning or a horror story for other consumers.

But does hijacking of servers create that kind of publicity? Sometimes companies have to admit that they have been hacked because of data leak. But do they publicly admit for every breach? Is it in private companies interest to go public with that kind of information? And if they do, does it reach non-technical newspapers?

There was a good thread about Linux kernel security today, a slideshow and video. TLDR; many unsafe practices because of C, bad project management to track bugs, triage bugs, correctly applying patches, correctly map patches with CVEs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27513149

cough Heartbleed cough

> Updates regularly reset all the power settings so it suspends after 30 minutes.

I have also hit this behavior and it is shocking - I gave a relative a laptop that should get 7 hours of battery life, but she was getting maybe 2 (and the laptop would get boiling hot) because the power mode defaulted to "performance". I fixed it for her when I visited but it reset itself after I left - a condition it remained in until the computer died from chronic overheating. It's scandalous.

Every 2-3 days? Microsoft doesn't even publish patches that require reboots that often.

NEVER has a Microsoft patch ever reset my power settings to re-enable standby after X minutes. I have dozens of machines that I use between home and work. never once has that happened.

there's something else going on

Every major update e.g. 29H2 has reset the power settings the past couple of years. Patches don't do this, but the major updates do seem to reset a whole swath of basic settings and it's bloody infuriating.

No major release has ever done this to me. I have a desktop PC which I first installed Windows 10 on in 2015, and where I initially turned off the stupid "standby after 20 minutes of inactivity" setting, whatever it's called, and not once have I ever need to repeat that action. On that computer or any other.

Lucky you. I've seen it personally, look upthread.

It’s entirely possible the behaviour varies on different hardware/driver combinations.

So this comes up every time Windows comes up. I have a "Pro" version, went into Group Policy Editor and changed updates to require user action. This setting is supported by Microsoft and persists through updates. It only updates if I tell it to update.

Is that too hard to discover? Do you use a Home edition? (Obviously if you use any unsupported registry hacks it can revert to default behaviour any time...)

I have already tried this and all of the other recommendations out there including Shutup10 (on Win 10 Pro). It's quite possible it was working and got reset on an update, lots of things seem to get reset.

But whatever the actual case, it's not at all obvious what triggers the reboots or why. It doesn't even have the courtesy to ask. It just does it and loses all my current work and VM states. The deliberate removal of direct user control is absolutely nuts. I didn't buy my computer with its primary purpose being applying Windows updates and rebooting. It's there for me to use for doing work, and it's failing at that by placing Microsoft's whims above my needs.

You think Microsoft hid that in a GPO because it has great discoverability?

> Updates regularly reset all the power settings so it suspends after 30 minutes.

Until recently, I was having major issues with every update resetting network and sharing settings, which essentially caused shared folders to become invisible to other computers on the network. It was a real pain and I'm glad they seem to have fixed whatever was causing it.

I have a Surface for work that does this if you move it at all.

By far, the most effective tactic I've found for controlling those update-triggered reboots is quite simple:

Set your wifi as metered.

That's it. It'll tell you about updates, but not auto-download them, until like 6 months or something have passed. It'll even actually fail to download them sometimes, even when you click the download button... but un-metering easily fixes that.

For Pro SKUs on up, group policy isn't exactly obvious but it is more effective. You can disable automatic downloading or installation of updates, and you can disable forced rebooting. You can also disable Cortana, most telemetry, and some other things. I've yet to see it messed with by an upgrade and it applies no matter what network you connect to.

I think you can disable Cortana (and many other annoyances) by just disabling the service. But yeah, group policy is generally more capable and fine grained.

And yeah, Cortana was one of the first things I killed off after getting a windows machine again, though I don't remember for sure how. It's so bad.

You can but one of the grievances with what Microsoft is doing with Windows is the tendency to reverse some of those electives after you install an update. I haven't seen this happen with GP, probably because MS isn't in the habit of duping their corporate customers (yet?).

N.B. same guy, different account because passwords are hard.

i have 33 days of uptime on my win 10 machine atm

You know, I wouldn't even mind about telemetry in the calculator if that would have told them that I activate Programmer Mode a whole lot through the Alt+3 shortcut, and that my muscle memory of 20 years was completely ruined by them moving the Programmer Mode to Alt+4 for GUI consistency (after they added a new Graphing Mode that they wanted to stick right next to the Scientific Mode).

Oh, there is a graph mode?

Nevermind, I just crashed it with "sin(x)sin(y)<0"

Microsoft doing in 2021, what Apple did in 1999.

(Microsoft PowerToys for XP had a graphing calculator but it doesn't support inequalities.)

I coincidentally had to fire up Sheepshaver recently so I've got it on hand. I put that inequality in the MacOS 8 Graphing Calculator and it gave me a nice looking checkerboard. Except I had to write it as "sin(x)sin(y)<0" or else it would think I meant "sin(xsin(y))<0", which is pretty itself.

I was going for sin(x)sin(y)>0.1, but I never got that far with the Windows one. Here it is in Desmos, you can move the slider:

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/izui2rwylh

If they had used that telemetry to realise that maybe just maybe people tended to use the same mode and it might be an idea to store it and reapply it on launch then I could see a point to the telemetry. But they aren't even using it to solve the problems their users have, it is just data collection for collections sake if the applications aren't improving!

It always has stored the last used mode here. Does it not do that for you? Smells like a bug if it doesn't.

If only we had some sort of telemetry to identify this possible bug and address it...

Do you suppose loyalty card telemetry is used to improve the customer's shopping experience?

Or do you suspect it might possibly be used for other purposes?

At least loyalty cards give something in exchange, a discount, a free item etc.

Software telemetry only gives us headaches

Side note about the Alt-1/2/3/4 shortcuts in calculator - does anyone else find that they only work sporadically? I just tried it a bunch of times now and got maybe 50-60% success rate on it actually triggering the mode switch.

It's not just those shortcuts. There is a weird keyboard focus bug where it gets confused if you use both the mouse and the keyboard.

Good god, I never knew about the date calculator option. To add years, months or days to a date there are three drop downs with the values 1 to 999, why on earth is it done this way?

Same, I usually press them 2-3 times to make sure they work.

SpeedCrunch is one of the first programs I install on a new machine, probably just after Everything, WizTree and Unlocker.

Often "telemetry" is collected just because it's possible, the more the merrier, rarely is it used to actually improve the product.

Another thing, you used to be able to easily a) create a local account, b) create a domain account, c) create a default profile that new accounts used.

The new and improved setup gave us a crap start menu (apps vs programs etc), all sorts of crap defaults that no one would ever want, endless advertising disguised as "helpful" prompts. Did you know internet explorer is 10x faster than chrome? Did you know IE has been replaced by edge which is even faster than IE was? etc

It’s called Windows 10 LTSC and it’s great.

Sadly, Microsoft won’t sell it to you. But it’s... out there.

At least until Microsoft wraps-up the Open Business licensing program you can still acquire LTSC thru that program. You'll have to work with a reseller. It's a bit of a pain, but it's not too bad. I've used Dell and CDW in the past.

The minimum volume license buy is 5 licenses. Any good reseller will sell you 1 copy of LTSC and 4 of the cheapest SKU in the catalog (usually $5-10 / ea) to get your volume license contract started. After that you used to be able to purchase piecemeal for 2 years before you need to fulfill the minimum purchase again. The licenses themselves are perpetual. With the program being killed I'd treat it as a one-time purchase and assume you have no further rights after October (I think) of this year.

I don't like it, but it's not too hard to do either. The trick is finding a reseller who will leave you alone after the purchase (no sales calls, etc).

Im unconcerned about the calls but this doesn’t sound feasible for >500 seats.

LTSC isn't intended for day-to-day PC users. MSFT would happily sell you licensed for 500 seats. I have had Customers with >500 seat Open License contracts. (It's all pretty meaningless now since the program is effectively dead anyway...)

If you have that kind of volume can't you buy LTSC from relatively normal channels?

The Open License program is a "normal" channel. Many small and medium businesses acquired their licenses for MSFT products that way.

I'm glad I'm allowed to run LTSC. I've never seen a desktop OS that stable. I run it for months without reboots with a heavy usage and I never got any problems with it since I started using it in 2015.

I find that LTSC still sneaks in an OS update (and a reboot) every now and then, even though it is not supposed to be doing that.

No, that's as expected! LTSC still gets updated, but only for security issues—they will never change anything else.

That means the updates are smaller and less frequent, and rarely break anything. Personally, this is exactly what I want.

There are registry keys which will fully turn off automatic updates, if you want. I use these in Virtual Machines, since I don't boot those frequently and they're supposed to be disposable. I'm pretty sure they also work in Enterprise and Pro, btw.

For what it's worth one of LTSC updates dropped the display frame rate to 5 fps until the machine was rebooted and another spawned a temporary process that started eating 80% of CPU. Both happened in a span of just several months.

Windows 10 LTS is all fun and games until you've got a samsung laptop, where the only supported way to load all the drivers is through their app on the Windows store, which does not work/isnt installed on LTS.

Honestly though, not having my hardware volume keys work is a small price to pay for not having the regular windows 10 garbage.

There's got to be other ways to get the drivers, usually the hardware is generic enough if you pull the PCI ids you can get them from Windows update or manufacturers' websites, right?

Or is it all proprietary Samsung silicon...

I find Win10 Enterprise to be almost as good, with some group policies set (like "Turn off Microsoft consumer experiences" and "Restrict Internet communication," among others) it is quite stable and unobtrusive.

It's absurd how much better LTSC is than publicly available versions of Win 10. If you have enterprise licensing or MSDN subscriptions or Partner connections, the only reason not to run it is if you really, really need WSL. Even then, I think you can get it enabled if you really need to.

> the only reason not to run it is if you really, really need WSL. Even then, I think you can get it enabled if you really need to.

Indeed you can; I don't recall any difference between LTSC and non-LTSC when it comes to enabling WSL (though I haven't tried since WSL 2 came around, so maybe things changed).

Another reason not to run it is if any of the games you play require > 1809.

What would an example of that be?

Flight Simulator comes to mind, but that's the only one I know of (and it’s pretty unique in a lot of ways).

My Windows PC is a gaming machine pretty much exclusively, and it runs LTSC.

Yep, sibling is correct. I'd used LTSC for all my gaming until MSFS came out, then I had to switch to Windows 10. Looking forward to the next LTSC version so I can switch back, hope it has WSL2.

FWIW, Enterprise is the same, but with more updates... which sadly install at whatever time W10 wants with no regard for active hours (not sure what's up with that).

The updates are one of the things I like about LTSC though. It gets security updates only, so the behavior of the system never changes out from under me, and the updates download and install very quickly!

In an enterprise you’re supposed to manage the computers, run your own updates server, set the install time yourself etcetera

You should look into an alternative then. Linux is quite beginner friendly these days and with Wine you can emulate pretty much any Windows application if that's what's holding you back from switching. If not then MacOS is the way to go. If you really want to go "back" then you should have a look at ReactOS which is a sort of an open-source Windows clone.

I can't comment on recent Windows-related event as XP was the last version of Windows that I used and even back then I wasn't happy about all the "spyware" that came with it. I can only imagine it's gotten worse since then.

Yeah until an update to the graphics driver, followed by a reboot, takes you to a black screen and nothing happens. So you use another computer to look online and there are five different solutions for five slightly different versions of different linux distributions, but none of them are the version you have and none of them work for your version.

This all happened six months ago, which is the most recent attempt at using the "now user-friendly version" of linux that stretches back 20 years.

I've been using various Linux and BSD flavours as my main desktop OS and also at work for over 15 years now and never had any major issue such as the one you describe. So now what are we going to do? How do we decide who is right and who is wrong? I don't understand these types of comments, if an alternative doesn't work for you then you keep using what you were in the first place. There's no problem here. What exactly are you suggesting, that you experienced a problem so it won't work for anyone else?

The original poster is correct. For some configurations Linux is a complete shit show of pain. And it is not stable over time. I had a nicely working T495 which is apparently officially supported by Ubuntu. Worked wonderfully for ages. Then about 3 months ago a kernel update broke it. It works for about ten minutes then the GPU driver craps itself.

The point of this kind of post is a counter-voice to the "Hey guys! Linux is desktop-ready now and so much better!" That might be true for some people. It hasn't been true for me every time I've tried out Linux, and I've been giving various flavors a shot since RedHat 2. And trying to find help or documentation for troubleshooting problems in Linux can be an absolute nightmare because of the million flavors and versions of linux and the chains of dependency for all of the different installations. If one person gets lazy (or is on vacation or dies) and doesn't update one specific part of a dependency chain, everything falls apart and good luck finding someone who is having the same problem who documented it in a way that google can bring you to.

I'm happy Linux "just works" for you, but that hasn't been my experience.

My experience was the same until I started to use off-the-shelf or simply “consumer top” hardware, then it changed. It all shines and then you get a recent laptop or a mobo that aren’t a sped up version of IBM PC/AT or 8259. I also managed a small park of BSD and Linux boxes at work for a while.

What exactly are you suggesting, that you experienced a problem so it won't work for anyone else?

People can give it a try, but shouldn’t expect that it’s all okay once it shows a wallpaper. Committing to something like OS requires a prior knowledge of operational risks. I think this.

—

ReactOS in a nutshell: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U6d7E1uKSmg

They obviously make fun of it too shamelessly, but suggesting to use it… is it another level of trolling (no offense)?

Do you carefully curate your hardware? Only purchase from a very limited selection and don't use advanced hardware features (biometric authentication, for example)?

Those are loaded questions, I'm quite sure I know the answers (yes and yes).

It's on an older thinkpad. I can't remember the model. When linux blew up and I tried three different variants of linux and they all had different, annoying, time-consuming issues after about a week of use, I threw it in a drawer and got the ad blocker on my router working (which was the main thing I was trying to use linux for on my home network).

Nvidia graphics driver perhaps? Linux with proprietary drivers tends to suck (and Nvidia has been especially unfriendly to FOSS drivers). Intel and AMD support open GPU drivers, which tend to be be better. This might be why you're hearing about experiences that don't match yours.

Also, people can have legitimately different priorities. Some folks might want freedom from vendors badly enough to buy inferior but supported hardware, and/or get their hands dirty dealing with problems. At least there's a choice.

I made the AMD choice and bought a T495 which is Ryzen + Radeon powered and supported by Ubuntu. The GPU drivers shit a brick every 10 minutes.

I now own a Macbook Air.

I'm really interested in what happened. because Ubuntu isn't the best distro to choose when you have cutting/bleeding edge hardware.

Well basically I went here and it said it was supported https://ubuntu.com/certified/201905-27049

Which it was. Then it broke.

On NixOS, you just reboot to the previous version thanks to immutability.

Linux GPU stuff is rough, but the above really helped. + Nix has a declarative way to configure the driver so other people did the hard part for me anyways.

Nix allows fearless Linux hacking (and thus, gaining of expertise.)

Personally I'd rather deal with a few bugs than deal with a hostile operating system which is determined to surveil me and curtail my freedom of choice using dark patterns and uncontrollable settings.

Even if Windows 10 has problems with scattered settings, old style programs vs new style apps, default apps and start menu annoyances, Linux Desktop annoyances are on a completely different level.

The huge Gnome 3 schism, that lead to many different Gnome forks. And consequently GTK is more of a Gnome 3 toolkit rather than a universal toolkit, which will affect non-gnome GTK apps.

And if you manage to pick a desktop, hopefully by avoiding Gnome 3 because it constantly changes workflow and uses buggy JavaScript plugins, you realize that you will probably have Gnome 3 installed anyway because apps or the distro having dependencies to Gnome, if you don’t want to settle for old forks of those apps with less features.

And if you didn’t pick Gnome (or KDE) it is a good idea to install a compositor if you don’t like software rendered desktop like the good old Windows 9x days.

Be sure to turn the compositor off if you plan to play any games, especially if you thinking about playing on Wine. Or accept to always play in full screen. This will of course annoy you every time you need to look up something online.

If your game doesn’t run well, just add this unknown PPA that will installs nightly compiled graphics libraries (who wouldn’t?).

And if your computer freezes mid game, sorry you didn’t change the virtual memory size before because it is a fixed size. Tough luck.

And then of course the entire X vs Wayland situation.

> And if you didn’t pick Gnome (or KDE) it is a good idea to install a compositor if you don’t like software rendered desktop like the good old Windows 9x days.

So I haven't gone out of the way to install a compositor (are you talking a wayland compositor, or the older Compiz type stuff)?

But I have 2x1440p and 1x1080p and I've not noticed any perf issues, which I assume is what you're highlighting as the downside?

And I use all three major desktop OSes daily, so it's not that there's some blazing fast responsiveness to be had on Windows or OS X I'm unaware of.

> If your game doesn’t run well, just add this unknown PPA that will installs nightly compiled graphics libraries (who wouldn’t?).

This feels like five years out of date. Just pick a compatibility tool dropdown in Steam for most people. Lutris if you want something open source.

> And if your computer freezes mid game, sorry you didn’t change the virtual memory size before because it is a fixed size. Tough luck.

I haven't had a swap partition in years, and not once has it lead to a game crash.

Older compositor like compiz and compton. I have only used Wayland with Gnome 3. Without compositor I experienced screen tearing. Less popular desktop environments and window managers usually only support X.

My subjective feeling is that the snappiness is better in Windows than Linux and MacOS. I think that the pure desktop experience (moving & resizing windows, graphics, font rendering, login/logout, shortcuts, etc) is still unbeatable on Windows. What has gone downhill for Windows is the changes due to mobile & tablet adaptions and the cloud integration (Microsoft account vs local account etc).

I needed to install more up to date graphic libraries thru a PPA to avoid artifacts and weird rendering for a Steam installed game (Crusader Kings 3). Lutris is great, but to my understanding you need to manually install dxvk to get the best performance (someone can correct me on that (and Wine 6 broke a lot of things)). Also make sure you are running the correct gfx kernel module or otherwise hack your grub file.

Yes, you can disable swap entirely and hope it doesn't affect stability. By default Ubuntu creates a 2GB swap file, but if you are on a 16GB machine (not an unusual setup for a desktop computer) that can fill up pretty quickly and Linux will go into a swapping frenzy. You can't even ssh into the machine, just hard reboot or hope it recovers this hour.

When this happens the first time, it is not obvious that it is the swap file that is at blame for what happened. I'm not sure if it even exist a GUI for chaining the swap file size in Gnome (Disks app maybe?). But if you manage to change the swap file size, you have to decide, can I turn it off and hope nothing breaks or should increase it to match whatever RAM or more. It is weird that a desktop operating system ships with a feature that doesn't work.

>And consequently GTK is more of a Gnome 3 toolkit rather than a universal toolkit, which will affect non-gnome GTK apps.

This is not really true, and has not affected anything that I've seen. Basically every GTK desktop (including GNOME) has another separate widget library on top of GTK, to include its own widgets specific to that desktop. Also GTK3 is currently release frozen and will not be adding any more features, GTK4 is the current version.

>hopefully by avoiding Gnome 3 because it constantly changes workflow and uses buggy JavaScript plugins,

I haven't seen any desktop system that doesn't change workflow over time, or doesn't have some bugs in the plugins. That's a sad fact of life when you have hundreds of plugins made by various people, with varying quality. FYI KDE is also using javascript as a plugin language for the desktop, and for a number of other QML things, so it makes no sense to single out GNOME for use of javascript: https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/scripting/

>And then of course the entire X vs Wayland situation.

The situation with compositing should improve over time with Wayland, the idea there is to not ever turn off compositing (though the Wayland implementations are still optimizing this for the various edge cases).

GTK, here are two forum threads that covers this.

GTK3 regressions from a GTK2 perspective

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/gtk3-regressions-from-a-gtk2...

Horrible GTK3 / GNOME UI design is leaking into Ubuntu Mate applications in 20.04

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/horrible-gtk3-gnome-ui-desig...

And then you have the terminal Termite

https://github.com/thestinger/termite

  This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their hostility towards other 
  projects using VTE as a library. GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of 
  the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are 
  meant for others to use.

JavaScript can definitely work as scripting language for a desktop environment, but it doesn't work for Gnome in the current state.

I have written about this topic before, see thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27195694,

quoting myself

  Personally I prefer building GUIs in a scripting language 
  like JavaScript over a compiled language like C and C++

and

  I think for Gnome and other desktops that uses this 
  technique, it is in the right direction

But the negatives in short are poor documentation, memory leaks, you end up only using the approved plugins (if you don't like to restart your desktop more than once a day) which of course negates the whole idea of a plugin system.

>GTK3 regressions from a GTK2 perspective

It's a bit odd to read this sentence. GTK2 got its last minor release over 10 years ago, and was EOLed 6 months ago. It's a dead project. GTK3 is also feature frozen as of 6 months ago, and will not see any features brought back from GTK2. If you want to get some of these issues fixed, it would be best to start submitting patches to GTK4, or trying to find other solutions that will work there. Or, you could try to revive some of that GTK2 code yourself, although I wouldn't recommend it -- a lot of that code is very obsolete.

>Horrible GTK3 / GNOME UI design is leaking into Ubuntu Mate applications in 20.04

This is a design decision made independently by the MATE developers to update their app to a different design, no? I don't see what GNOME has to do with this. Regardless of your feelings on it, at least one person seems to have thought it was the right decision.

>And then you have the terminal Termite

I remember this issue from last time it was discussed, I think the Termite maintainer overreacted as a result of a very normal technical disagreement. I don't really witness them rejecting patches any more than any other project. I also disagreed with that developer's decision to fork on a technical level, I thought that was unnecessary and could have been avoided.

>But the negatives in short are poor documentation, memory leaks, you end up only using the approved plugins (if you don't like to restart your desktop more than once a day) which of course negates the whole idea of a plugin system.

Some people are actually working on the docs, please contribute if you are able: https://gjs.guide/

There have been issues with memory leaks in the past, but those are bugs that can pop up with any garbage collected language. I'm not sure what you'd expect them to do, besides do the normal thing, and fix the individual bugs whenever possible.

I hate that I always have to say this, but there is no alternative to only using approved plugins, on any plugin system. I don't know what you mean it negates it. In Javascript the crashes and hangs are usually from unhandled exceptions and infinite loops -- This is even worse with a C or C++ plugin system, because those are memory unsafe and can cause bad segfaults. If the javascript is causing segfaults then that's probably a bug that should be reported.

One can complain about Windows, but at the end of the day I have way more issues with desktop Linux (which I use principally.)

I find myself in an awkward situation where I don't like any of the three major desktop operating systems for different reasons. It's more a matter of picking the one that's less bad. Currently for me that's Linux for work, Windows for games, and Mac for a laptop.

I need a new laptop next year. I'll probably go for a Windows laptop where I can dual boot Linux.

I've been using Linux on-and-off since the fall of 1993 and I've learned that the best way to use Linux is to pick the most popular distribution and then do as little customization as possible. You still will probably have to wipe and reinstall from scratch every five years, but that's not a Linux-only problem.

That's also been my strategy. I use Ubuntu and I don't mess with the configuration.

Printers, scanners, nvidia graphics cards, dual monitors have all been a huge source of issues for me.

Then a lot of stuff is just glitchy and fixing it is a pain. For some reason QT from apt was completely messed up for me, so I had to compile and install it myself, which was non trivial.

My non-customization strategy extends to basically not connecting printers and scanners, not using anything other than basic video modes, and I've never even tried multi-monitor setups.

That's definitely safer based on my experience.

Check out FreeBSD or OpenBSD. Worth looking into, many ppl use these as their daily driver desktop OS.

Not sure why someone decided to downvote my comment, as it's a completely valid suggestion made in good faith and not some kind of nag or offtopic.

The BSD OSes are often overlooked as a desktop platform despite being very easy to run and configure. They have excellent built-in documentation that the rest of the community could take inspiration from. They are a complete OS built and maintained together, rather than a distribution of disparate software from various sources bundled around a kernel. Even this reason alone is enough to make them very cohesive, and easy to understand. Their default installations are minimal (perhaps even to a fault in some users' eyes) allowing you to be clearly aware of the software that gets installed. Managing and configuring services is, IMO, far easier than on Linux (depending on distribution).

This introduction to OpenBSD is a good video to watch get a bit of an idea of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkDVKthufAM

I understand that it's not for everyone, but I thought it's worth mentioning in case you hadn't looked at this family of OSes before, since I think they offer a huge amount of what Linux offers, but in a more cohesively-structured and simplified way. I'm definitely gradually becoming more invested myself (though still testing the waters hehe).

Definitely worth looking at BSDs. For servers they are a no-brainer (as is illumos) but GhostBSD is also quite nice desktop ready edition of FreeBSD with GUI installer and all. Been trialing it at $work for general desktop use instead of linux and it seems to run pretty good on quite new hardware as well.

> Linux is quite beginner friendly these days

Not only that - Linux as a standard Debian or Ubuntu system did also become astonishingly beginner-friendly for people who do not like to tinker with computers, and just use them to read mail, edit documents, and browse the web. It's literally setting up once, send them the laptop, it works for five years or more, without any servicing.

> Wine you can emulate pretty much any Windows application if that's what's holding you back from switching.

That’s just not true. I wish it were but much of the real pro software you can’t get in Linux doesn’t worn.

Yes, please do not make such claims without actually knowing.

Just because some games are running more or less stable, doesn't mean you can run complex software with it.

That's a very bold assumption to make.

I said "pretty much any" not "every" since we're talking about regular usage of a computer. OP didn't mention anything in particular so I suggested three alternatives. Before you start calling people out you should first define what "complex" is.

PowerPoint 2016 is listed as “garbage” in winehq, and that’s the latest version listed.

Recent Photoshop is either silver or garbage depending on the version. Premiere is listed as garbage for all versions.

Newest iTunes is bronze.

I’m not even trying to find bad examples. I’m just poking around in their public db for popular software that doesn’t exist in Linux. I’ve run into this every time I try to use wine for real — it’s never worked well. It’s also a really hard problem! You basically need to re-write Windows and all of it’s related components, which one of the worlds biggest companies has spent decades on and however many billions of dollars. But it’s not like “pretty much any” windows software will run well. It’s quite selective outside of games.

This.

So claiming "pretty much any" windows software runs in wine, is the "very bold assumption", not backed up by reality.

Because yeah, there is a lot of windows software somewhat running ... but somewhat running is not enough, when you want to work with it.

Linux was quite beginner friendly twenty plus years ago, IME. Remember Mandrake Linux? Then you had Ubuntu ten years ago! It's had enough time. The one thing that used to repeatedly make me chuckle was the "This will be the year of the Linux desktop" stories, which seemed to appear almost yearly! :)

It’s easier to complain about and keep using Windows than to retrain, support, and make all programs compatible for >500 people, unfortunately.

I remember being angry about “activation.” sigh, the good old days.

There was never any real reason to ever "upgrade" beyond Windows 7, except that MS stopped supporting it. It still works fine. I know numerous people who still run it as their daily driver, including playing all the latest games (there are very very few that actually _require_ Windows 10).

I also have to question whether these UX changes provide any benefit to users at all. They strike me as nothing but a cost to users in terms of familiarity and discoverability. Unless the new UI changes are somehow objectively better in any of those regards, it's a net negative change. I know some people will say, for example, "you can change the task bar back to where it was". However, apparently less than 5% of users ever change default settings, according to an unfortunately-anecdotal article[0], so a change like this presumably decides how ~95% of people will use the OS.

I can't wait to explain to my 83 yr old uncle (who doesn't understand the difference between a website and an application on the computer) why everything just randomly moved over and looks way different, after he has spent years just getting familiar with basic usage of the computer to begin with.

[0] https://archive.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-chan...

In know you shouldn't have to but I've found O&O ShutUp10 to be a great piece of software to stop a few of the more annoying parts of Windows 10.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

The correct way to handle something like this would be DSC, at least the way you can actually set Local Policy correctly instead of just modifying the registry.

Yep, keep underlying invisible improvements of 10 like the kernel but ditch the whole UI and revert it back to Windows 7. It was peak Windows design (second is Windows Classic UI) and change for sake of change totally ruined it.

This might be showing a difference in our age and/or when we were exposed to Windows UI, but I think the Windows UI peaked at Windows 2000.

Crisp 2D with borders, separations, edges, UI elements were not hidden, obvious scroll bars, AND distinct colouring.

As you referenced 'Classic Mode', it was VERY close to Win2k UI, but not the same.

Agreed. Whoever is working on the kernel and PowerShell at MS can stay, everyone working on Windows UX is fired. Preferably out of a cannon and into the sun.

> everyone working on Windows UX is fired. Preferably out of a cannon and into the sun.

I was on the Windows accessibility team, which was under the shell org. Not everything that we did in Windows 10 was bad. The Narrator screen reader built into Windows 7 sucked (my former colleagues and managers agreed); we made that much better in Windows 10. I wouldn't want to go back to Windows being the only platform where the only good screen readers were the third-party ones, and those products had to use ugly hacks to make Windows accessible.

For those who are not aware of its existence, there are some projects, that try to keep up with a "debloater", meaning they maintain a script, to remove as much of that crap as possible. First thing I do on a new windows computer:

https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater

It is not perfect, some stuff remains as Microsoft regulary "improves" their bloatware setup. But it makes windows so much more bearable.

There's also Blackbird

https://www.getblackbird.net/

Been using this since release

Pass. Windows 10 is just so much better than 7. I still don’t get why people don’t move on. I’m happier having window 10 which has never crashed on me vs 7 which did it weekly.

Neither Win7 nor Win10 crashes on me, but the whole "user experience" has been such an inconsistent mess after Win7, even though Win10 tried to undo the worst UX sins of Win8 it's still a far ways off from Win7.

It's as if the Windows team is trying to throw random shit to the wall to see what sticks instead of trying to do slow and steady improvements.

Apparently Win10 has some serious improvements over Win7 under the hood, but those technological improvements don't count much if the user facing parts are quickly deteriorating.

Win 7 doesn't handle high dpi properly, doesn't have secure boot, storage pools, usb 3 (IIRC), DX12, face unlock, etc. There is quite a lot of UX stuff that has changed since 7.

Most of those are what I described as under-the-hood-changes though.

I do understand where you're coming from, but I guess I see it differently - For e.g. High DPI directly impacts UX for me as I can run older applications at 150% without squinting at the tiny icons. Security is part of UX for me, etc.

Windows 7 has the old network stack, can be slower in some situations.

Lots of security improvements since Windows 7 with Windows Defender.

Didn’t MS also improve font rendering?

OS stability is not the thing that people are concerned about when criticising Windows 10. What has made me turn away from windows is the complete lack of trust I have that the OS will respect my privacy.

This.

I switched from 7 to 10 when it was offered. I stayed with 10 for about one year, and I liked it thanks to all the fixes and improvements and despite the occasional quirk.

But after one year, I realized my computer didn't feel like it was mine anymore. I jumped to linux and never went back.

I like reading these kinds of comments, but then I snap back to reality. It's easier to make Windows 10 behave than make Linux actually work properly beyond a browser and an editor.

How so? Not to start the old windows vs linux flamewar but if something in Windows doesn't work the way you want it you don't have many options. In Linux you can change absolutely everything... and people have been making it "actually work properly" for decades. This feels like just your personal experience about how some Linux distro didn't work out of the box the way you wanted.

Yeah it's a useless debate. If you're lucky to only need software that runs on Linux and you use desktop hardware, it likely works well. It certainly works great in a VM, unlike Windows.

> it's a useless debate

Not really. It's just too complicated of a "debate" (it's actually a non-debate) or discussion to dive into the differentiating factors that will assume different priorities for different people. Tradeoffs are everywhere and in everything and so is nuance.

Personally, I am growing tired of chasing Windows releases every few years so I will re-prioritize almost entirely around Linux's strengths.

this is just false.

It's sort of true.

For example, I have a 3700x / 5700XT computer. Windows 10 runs flawlessly without issues. Ubuntu, or any flavour of Ubuntu, runs like garbage. I have to fix screen tearing, slow boot, sleeping. Then from a clean install, open up firefox, and it crashes multiple times per day. It's not even close to stable.

Yet I run any flavour of Ubuntu on my Intel laptop and it's flawless.

Setup Manjaro on this same desktop, and it works flawlessly, yet on the same laptop if I use Wayland, it's completely broken.

Yet all the same hardware, never had an issue with Windows.

So my point is: Everyones experience is different. For some people they can set it up and fix it to be flawless, others just want to set it up and use it, not fiddle around.

Ubuntu started collecting telemetry in 2018, I don't see how it's invasive at all.

The difference between invasive and non-invasive telemetry is choice. If you give me the choice to turn it off, there's some sense of mutual trust: you trust me to leave it enabled if I have no reason not to and I trust you not to abuse the information collected. When there is no choice, as with Windows 10, I have to wonder why. What are you collecting that you won't allow me to turn it off at my discretion? What are you doing with that information that earning my trust is not an option?

Linux is not just Ubuntu, there are plenty of distributions to choose from.

It's asked one time, options are straight forward, and you can preview what gets sent to Ubuntu.

The approach is far more reasonable than what Windows does.

Ubuntu is not all of Linux

I guess that's the business norm. It's not really that Windows 7 is better than Windows 10, but that traditional business practices - of buying tools and using them and a respect for users - was better than modern business practices - of data and limited services and a confidence that the plan is always right. Everything has changed to foster that distrust, even completely non-computer services like journalism, taxis and food delivery.

If Microsoft would go back to pick up development from Windows 7, or Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, it would still be about abusing their customers.

I still don't get why Apple/Google are totally fine to collect telemetry but Microsoft is somehow supposed to not do that.

Well on Apple platforms it’s easy to turn off with a single checkbox, which they explicitly ask you about at setup.

iOS infamously collects your location data even when you opt out of Apple's iOS analytics; it's more of illusion of control than anything.

Source?

Probably referring to this story: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/the-iphone-11-pros-locat...

Interesting. Maybe GP comment knows something I don't, but from your article, this seems like much ado about nothing. From your article and the linked follow-up:

The issue:

"[Apple's] policy [is]: “You can also disable location-based system services by tapping on System Services and turning off each location-based system service.” But apparently there are some system services on this model...which request location data and cannot be disabled by users without completely turning off location services."

Apple's response:

“We do not see any actual security implications,” an Apple engineer wrote in a response to KrebsOnSecurity. “It is expected behavior that the Location Services icon appears in the status bar when Location Services is enabled. The icon appears for system services that do not have a switch in Settings”

"...“Ultra Wideband technology is an industry standard technology and is subject to international regulatory requirements that require it to be turned off in certain locations,” the statement continues. “iOS uses Location Services to help determine if iPhone is in these prohibited locations in order to disable Ultra Wideband and comply with regulations. The management of Ultrawide Band compliance and its use of location data is done entirely on the device and Apple is not collecting user location data.”"

Nobody's excusing them in this thread. But for me, Windows 8 was actually the last straw. I hate this "all your data are belong to us" mentality, and that absolutely includes smartphones, tablets, and internet "things" [edit: as well as PCs].

When a company, that has been playing a dirty game for decades making a monopoly of their software while collecting billions++ in licenses, people tend to expect some standards; and rightfully so.

Apple doesn't monetize their user's data, for one.

Whomever said it was okay for Google? There is a reason ublock origin and temporary tabs are installed in my firefox.

Who said anything about Apple and Google? Who said it is about telemetry? Unless you mean any and all data is telemetry.

My privacy, and my time.

No, I don't want your ads. No, I don't want your nagging. I want you to shut up and leave me alone. You're a tool that I bought, not my mother. I don't need you to nag me or give me advice.

Related gripe: When it wants you to do something, it offers you two options, "Yes" and "Ask me later". Conspicuously missing: "No, and never ask me again". It won't let me say no, just later. Grr.

We more or less know what they collect. Trust MS more than facebook, Google, Twitter, tiktok. I mean your privacy is probably violated more just browsing the net, even with all your ad blockers and tracking disabled, than using Windows for any daily task.

I only use Windows for gaming these days but privacy is hardly an issue in Windows compared to anything else.

I'm using Win 10 LTSC, and that is clearly better than 7, even if I have to work really hard to disable a ton of stupid crap, as well as a lot of telemetry.

I think it says a lot about Microsoft that they constantly move around the 'search with Bing from the start menu' setting, and make it harder to find every time. They know we turn it off, and they don't want us to.

In addition to that, even with the setting disabled, I STILL see "web searches" when I search from the start menu. Not every time though, which makes it more frustrating.

Windows 10 has lost me weekends' worth of experiment data multiple times thanks to its insistence on installing updates on a whim. Windows 7 has never done that. I would call Windows 7 more stable.

2011 Windows 7 desktop install still running daily at home with no signs of slowing down. Runs everything I need, even games. Never gave me a single issue even after frankenstining with added NVMe and newer GPU.

Two year old Win 10 work PC install committed suicide after updating few months back. Blue screen on boot. Spent more time "troubleshooting" that issue than reinstalling win 10 after giving up.

Well, those are 2 different PCs, so it's hard to compare them. Anyway I'm sure we all can come up with opposite stories as well, so to continue with anecdotes: unlike back in the days, blue screens (well, the ones I encounter, like 1 a year across 50+ machines of all ages) now are most often caused by actual harware failures the OS (be it Winows or linux) cannot cope with. Pre Windows-7 every stupid driver manufacturer would cause it instead. At least that has been fixed now.

I've had great success with Vista too. The point is Windows 10 is no where near as stable as you have no control over the update process which may nuke your install. It's a step backwards and offers no technological advantages.

As much as I dislike Windows in general, the NT based Windows systems have been very stable for a very long time. I once saw a server running NT 4.0 with 6 years uptime.

I don't know about Vista, but in my experience both XP and 7 have been very stable as long the hardware was reliable and no messy device drivers were in use (which includes AV software).

That being said, Windows 10 did a few things I liked, too.

Vista was a good OS. It’s just when it came out there was a huge lack of drivers. So everyone got upset. When 7 came out with less DRM, all the drivers were available at this point. And vista was solid.

I remember reading that before SP1, performance was very unpredictable; I read one review where it performed okay on a mediocre machine but was abysmally slow on a high end machine.

SP1, allegedly, fixed a lot of those problems, but by that time Vista's reputation was beyond repair.

The driver situation might have been made worse by the transition to 64-bit. I remember a friend of mine tried XP 64bit back in the day, and the system crashed constantly because some driver had been written with the assumption that a long is exactly 32 bits wide or something like that.

As far as Windows goes, I really liked 7. The UI was reasonably pretty and useful, performance was not too bad, compared to earlier versions, security was much better (or so I'm told, not being an expert).

Your experience with 7 is extremely atypical.

Right? The only time someone has weekly crashes is bad drivers or bad hardware. I had multiple-months uptime on my Win7 machines and it only wasn't longer because I would reboot for whatever non-essential reason.

I've had many more crashes on Windows 10 than Windows 7. I would guess it's more about what you're doing with the computer.

The only thing that was outright good about 10 were the improvements in how the taskbar and window management works. Port that to 7 and call it a day, I say.

That might be true for you but as a developer that uses it daily there have been hundreds if not thousands of improvements to 10 that I would not want to give up.

Such as what, exactly? Most languages are platform agnostic: Java, .NET, Python, Ruby, JS, TypeScript. Windows offers nothing to developers of these languages that Unixes haven't been offering already for decades.

As a developer, I'd be happier than anything if my work just let me have a bare-metal Linux machine to do my work on.

I wasn't comparing it to Unix. I was just responding to the parent that Windows 10 had many improvements over 7 and I would not want to go back?

I also enjoy Windows as a development platform quite a bit. It has made me a LOT of money in the last two decades so I can't complain. I like Linux a lot too, no need to only like one or the other.

I installed Windows without an internet connection and it pretty much feels like Windows 7

This new era in personal computing is "you are the product, not the customer." This always sucks but it's absolutely unforgivable in an OS that you actually pay for. If Windows were free maybe it'd be a compromise some people would make.

The old era of personal computing was actual personal computing. If you want that MacOS is the closest commercial OS, or use Linux or BSD if you have more tinkering tolerance.

Yeah. When you're the product and the customer? Not cool.

But I guess you can pay more and get the Professional version and have less garbage...

If you resent the telemetry (and I agree), you might want to check out Windows 10 AME. You can even find pre-built images, AFAIK.

I agree, try to play solitaire on win 10.

I had forgotten. So many clicks to get started and flashy things and "XP". Ugh.

they can do both, you know.

the people who fix bugs aren't the same people who make corners rounded it design control panel user interfaces or rename things.

the entire company doesn't focus on a single thing at a time.

Microsoft knows it's a dead end. It's time to put Pop OS or some other "user friendly" distro on your machines.

Yup. Windows runs great in a VM for the one or two apps with no Linux equivalent. Windows is just an application runtime.

If only.

Agree. I wish I could game on Linux. DX12 has really cemented the Windows monopoly. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

I have to use Windows to play. If the cloud gaming services supported Ultrawides, I may be off of it altogether.

Yeah, I never got into gaming on computers, so that’s not an issue for me. I have a Windows VM for DxO and some old scanner software.

Monkey’s Paw: Here you go! It is now called Windows 365, loses all legacy support and can only be leased on a monthly plan! The upside is that you don’t have to bother with all those pesky driver updates!

Windows 95, Windows XP and Windows 7 were the best.

You missed Windows 2000! I actually really liked it. Since it wasn't as consumer focused, there were occasional issues with GPUs/games, but for the most part it was really solid.

you know you could run Linux or something.

It’s true. But I still have to support the other 499 people in my org.

just use linux, is better

You almost cannot convince an entrenched org of decent size to switch.

Just use Linux. I don't see much point in using windows in 2021, even for gaming.

I don’t play games on my Windows machine. I support hundreds of people who will never use Linux because it would cost too much time and money to switch.

>even for gaming.

Gaming is quite possibly going to be an issue. Proton has made great strides, but some games just don't work well or at all.