But I'm finding it hard to believe that there isn't some escape hatch there. I absolutely cannot imagine that MSFT's corporate customers would play ball with something like that, and they still represent a powerful interest group where MSFT's decision-making is concerned. So there's got to be some escape hatch. Is it a Home vs Pro thing?
This was a very stark comparison to my experience on my machine that I use Win 11 Pro on, which has none of the advertising fluff, TikTok isn’t pre-installed and pushed onto me when I open the start menu. It just has the things I want, that I added, and use frequently in the start menu. I didn’t use any of those uninstall scripts that tend to gouge into the OS, but it was upgraded from Win10, which had been installed ~3 months earlier.
1. Settings (Win+I)
2. System
3. Notifications
4. [ ] Suggest ways I can finish setting up my device
Android is a great base, and some OEMs customise it to hell, and add their "bloat". Some is genuinely terrible, some is interesting. There's always Google and Motorola phones ( at the very least) which give stock experience, and popular FOSS versions you can flash yourself if you fancy them more.
Compared to the iOS experience, if you don't like it, you're holding it wrong ( does iOS finally support anything else besides all your apps are plastered on the home screen, with optional folders? As someone who grew up arguing with people who just put everything on their Desktop, i twitch thinking of that).
If it wasn't for MS Teams, Windows would be gone for a while now. No way I "upgrade" to Win11. Luckily, both laptops run professional Windows liscences, the backup one with only local accounts. So I hope that protects me from much of MS pressure to upgrade.
Being used to local software, with local accounts and without "telemetry", I see the benefit of tue cloud. Less for storage, but Steam is actually a charm for example. Overall so, I think software took head dive when it came to user experience, privacy and performance. The fact that my OS will be serving ads now in the file explorer can only be part of one of Dante's rings of hell...
Perhaps it's worth trying out?
Zoom on linux works well for me however.
Employer provided hard- and software is a different story all together.
It's a vicious cycle.
Please don't bootleg Windows. Even a pirate install counts as an install. Linux is so much better.
That said, yeah, at this point Windows is becoming so bad that even I, a vocal Linux Desktop critic, must admit that soon Linux will at least be the less shitty of the two.
[0] at least not for the people who are still using Windows. Obviously some amount of this comes down to how and why any given person uses a desktop computer at all.
I don't know what else to tell you. I am a moron, lazy and get easily frustrated.
I don't work in IT.
Installation is 15 minutes and everything just works perfect. There is no way people can have all these problems with Linux here if I can figure this out. If it was any type of frustration I would just stick with Windows.
I think many people here must just make things up about all these linux problems because it makes no sense to me at all.
I don't even know what a single directory outside of my /home directory is for.
With Linux, anything that goes wrong is almost certainly of own design.
No, [Ardour, LMMS, Darktable, ...] aren't going to do as replacements (for the nth time), but it's not at all their fault. I also don't fault them or Linux as a whole for the people who badger about it while ignoring the needs of the person they're pestering, but not everyone is able to make that distinction, and it comes to reflect poorly on the software.
As for ports of the stuff I do use, it seems the fault is in the lack of cohesion. It's not free to assign developers to port to even a reasonably narrow subset of toolkits and libraries to target the most users, and having a lawyer go over the licenses to see about packing it in costs money. And they're not likely to ever recover that cost in sales: the people who want it are already using the Windows or Mac version, and the people they might sell to are already productive and skilled with Linux options.
They have been for me. Darktable does not feel like a compromise. The ability to edit skin from RAW made the need for other editors pretty small. I go to Hugin to stitch panoramas but that's about it.
If you want actual evidence, you'd need to control for some variables like windows being preinstalled and about the only ads it got was Microsoft advertising "why not Linux" in the past. Right now you need to spend some effort to even give it a go.
For us techies, having to occasionally fall back to the terminal to fix a hiccup is worthwhile not having to deal with Microsoft's recent BS.
For a non-technical user however, Microsoft's BS means they can still accomplish their task, albeit slowly and without privacy, while Linux will leave them completely stranded if something breaks because they have no clue how to fix it.
It doesn't help that the Linux world spreads itself thin on reinventing the same square wheel 10 times (and arguing/fighting about which wheel is best - think systemd vs other inits, desktop environments, etc) completely ignoring (or denying) the fact that the wheel is square.
Is Windows really much different in this respect?
My partner is not at all interested in tech, and they use Fedora Silverblue (at my suggestion) because it's less intrusive than Windows and it's hard to break. It seems to behave weirdly less often than Windows did.
(The only thing that didn't just work was the printer, but we poked around in the printer settings a bit, and now it works.)
If Windows did just work, they wouldn't have been willing to switch to Silverblue.
The same line of reasoning concludes that McDonalds is better than home cooking.
(People are lazy and easily swayed by cheap psychological tricks)
It's also good if you just need to do one or two things and they happen to work on Linux. Some people install it on their grandma's internet PC.
Even a majority of Steam games seem to work on Linux now, via Valve's fork of Wine.
Depends on he kind of developer. Web developer? Probably. Game developer? It's a joke.
> Even a majority of Steam games seem to work on Linux now, via Valve's fork of Wine.
That at least is true, it's getting a lot better. However, VR is still a hell of a lot more problematic on Linux even if you're using Valve's hardware.
Like I said, a lot of it comes down to how and why you use a desktop computer in the first place.
I think it's better at technical things for any kind of developer or technical person, generally. (Even at non-technical things in some cases: KDE, as a desktop environment, wipes the floor with Windows's desktop environment, from the taskbar to the file manager.)
But if one developer's "better" includes "playing <AAA game with anticheat>" or "using Photoshop" or "using VR", the betterness is sharply decreased.
I count myself extremely lucky my need/want matrix has happened to align such that I'm much more comfortable on Linux than on Windows, but that alignment is sadly RNG. :p
Teams for Ubuntu works well enough.
Most people would still have a hard time switching to Ubuntu, but then again most people (outside of HN audience) have no use for the file manager, or are using work computers that somebody else is maintaining. The people who a) need Windows, and b) need to use something other than the browser, are a tiny minority who are also tech savvy enough to figure out some way to deal with this.
Where I see it as a dark pattern is, someone is trying to figure out how to do something on their Windows computer, and the first thing they see is an ad that looks like a help message, inviting them to install something that they have to pay for and exposes them to even more ads. It's like Clippy but takes your money.
Sorry, not for my needs, it's not. My powershell-gutted w10 pro runs the software i need with remarkably little fuss. I keep trying Linux every few years, but nope, not yet. So, dis-connected from the netm and piracy it will be.
After using all OSes, Linux is still lacking vendor support that Windows has, so one needs les time and lower level knowledge then on Linux to setup some things.
What we need is bloat free Windows, only kernel and package manager like Chocolatey/scoop/winget.
I have no seen this in my enviroment?
https://office365itpros.com/2021/04/01/microsoft-push-ads-te...
It's like quitting social media - mildly inconvenient, vastly better for your mental health.
Most of the annoyances are removed from there, and you can stick with an older version and not be forced to take the "feature" updates, 1809 works well.
The only issue i had is their new Terminal app is not supported, i forget why. Last i read they were working on support, maybe it works now.
A local KMS activator will license it, then you don't worry about adverts in Explorer, for a few years at least...
It does! It's a bit trickier than just getting it from the MS Store, because that's not a thing in Windows 10 LTSC, but you can install some dependencies and get Terminal from GitHub[1]. I just set it up a couple days ago on an LTSC virtual machine, and it works just fine.
[1] https://nerdschalk.com/how-to-install-windows-terminal-from-...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/stat...
The LTSC versions get 10 years of security updates.
I even checked endoflife.date, but it looks like they aren’t aware either!
But it’s basically impossible to buy for small numbers of computers legally. And when it’s possible, it’s crazy expensive. (no, those licenses on eBay are not legal.)
Also the base Windows is not updated, so you end up with weird issues with games, that expect newer Windows; but sometimes also normal software. And Store is not there, which you might actually miss.
--
"Microsoft recommentds Windows 11 for your device"
"blablabla it's the best"
"Learn more -- Decline upgrade -- Get it"
--
Pressing "Decline upgrade" yields a new screen:
--
"Not sure about Windows 11?"
"blablabla it's the best"
"Skip for now -- Get Windows 11"
--
And "Skip for now" brings me to my desktop.
I wonder if disabling TPM could be a solution.
This is not necessary, only a very niche like 1% of computer users use Linux as their primary OS
It's very troubling to me how a device (that I paid a lot of money for mind you) would do this without any sort of courtesy, and in such a disrespectful manner. This is the issue with modern software development, even the things we buy can be suddenly changed at the drop of a dime into a subscription service cash cow for big industry and we'll have no choice of escaping it all. Consumer Protection has failed us totally because they too invested deeply into these extortionist big corporations. The ads will only get worse year after year because it's all shareholder driven, and they will likely lobby other software and hardware manufacturers to not support alternate options like Linux. Good luck everyone.