I literally can’t install it even if I wanted to. If they removed that requirement the rollout would be the same as any other update.
Once, I was asked if I wanted a special offer on Microsoft Office on boot up. Explorer freezes so often for me when I right-click a file and select Open With that it’s made me twitchy. Frequently image icons stop displaying. For a long while, every time I’ve installed Windows on a computer, I’ve had to go through and disable all the awful misfeatures Windows tries to put in the taskbar. I also always have to set OneDrive so it doesn’t redirect folders like Desktop and Documents into its cloud storage area. Now Windows 11 is threatening to put CoPilot on my desktop, and I’ll have to disable it too.
I’m positively longing for Linux now.
I had to do all the same things on my work computer. If MS could stop shitting all over my taskbar that would be an amazing expression of basic decency. I’m about to go to IT and ask for a Linux computer that I can test with my day to day tools to make sure everything works. Typically only a few devs have them and those of us in support roles are on Windows. Microsoft is literally sapping away the time and effort my employer has paid me to put towards their customers. I use Linux at home and it has none of these problems. Actually, the worst problem I’ve had in years was a broken package that I simply uninstalled and re-added from a different source.
My daughter has a Windows 10 notebook for school. We haven’t seen a reason to upgrade yet. If Windows made a “never bother you again about anything you don’t want to be bothered about” version of Windows 11, we’d upgrade because that’s so fucking annoying. I hate Windows.
Honestly, Windows 11 works quite well, as a Windows system, but it feels unfinished. It feels like Microsoft pushed out a pre-release built and it trying to rush out fixes and completion patches.
And it’s not even as if I care one much one way or another, I moved away from Windows ages ago (decades, really). I only keep a partition around for the odd game, and it’s just staying around so that I can setup my Oculus CV1 again one of these days. It got upgraded to Win11, but probably hasn’t booted in over a year.
I boot Windows sometimes on my laptop where I kept a small 200MB partition, mostly to see what it looks like nowadays. I’m not certain the various updates are making the experience better (at least judging from my quick twenty minutes, tour, so that’s admittedly not worth much).
Its the only version of windows i ever had where the start menu of all thing stopped functioning. I had to restart. Wtf?
I want to just convert to using my Fedora 40 KDE install, but there are just too many blockers for me, both hardware and software.
I can vouch for that I have windows 11 and I want to go back to windows 10
Windows 11? Let’s see here…
Spyware/malware since that infamous Windows 7 update sending everything (including passwords) to Microsoft. Ads spread across the UI in W11. Simple features hidden or disabled. Bing Internet search results in the Start Menu that can’t be disabled unless you edit the registry. Search engine in the Start Menu cannot be changed. Numerous other previously simple settings changes that now require registry edits. Menu items gone, and others that still exist but inexplicable have been removed from the Start Menu search. Edge browser forced down your throat no matter what you set as the default browser. Upgrades that you can’t do at your convenience and forced restarts that happen even if you have open files that you’re editing. Long (sometimes really long) upgrade restart times. Forced Microsoft account use to install and use the OS & Internet access required to even install the OS. Absurdly inflexible hardware requirements that make no sense for most people. A taskbar that can’t be moved. Numerous programs and garbage spread through the OS that cannot be removed or disabled.
Besides that, what’s not to like?
You left out the forced rounded corners.
Holy shit.
I fucking hate that rounded corner mania which is spreading all over UI design decisions almost everywhere you look.I can tolerate it with window borders, but if rounded corners hide content, e.g., of videos or images, it really irrationally infuriates me.
My screens are rectangular. Not rounded. I paid for those pixels, so fucking use them! ò_ó
Windows 11 sucks ass, but I really get tired of people saying you are forced to use an account. There are multiple ways to make a local account in 11 when doing initial setup. It just sucks that it makes most people think that they have to use an account
Regular users are absolutely forced to use a Microsoft account, no matter how tired you are. People shouldn’t have to be techies to keep their information private.
You don’t have to be a techie to see it. There’s a button right below the email text box saying “Add a user without a Microsoft account” (here’s another variation). Sure if you don’t care about privacy then you might not notice it, but it’s pretty hard to miss if you actually don’t want to use an email. Microsoft sucks but don’t spread misinformation.
A tomshardware.com article about how to bypass the account requirement from February of this year:
https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-without-microsoft-account
It requires numerous steps to bypass the account requirement or the creation of special installation media. I ran into this when installing W11 on a VM in January.
Perhaps the screenshots you posted were accurate at some point or in some situations, but you need to do better research before accusing others of spreading misinformation and stop spreading it yourself.
Nested right click Windows are a deal breaker on their own before any real issues even pop up
I keep checking videos on YouTube from time to time about whether it is worth upgrading to Win 11 now (which people keep releasing regularly). Keep deciding it’s not worth changing.
Then I sold my laptop and had to use my Steam Deck for a couple of months. At that point I thought if I’m going to learn a different OS, then I might as well go all the way and jump over to Linux. Been very happy with OpenSUSE ever since.
This was my general takeaway. My laptop is showing it’s 9ish year old age considerably. I picked up a used Steam Deck and I actually love everything about it except that it’s really not powerful enough to replace my laptop. I’m interested in building a desktop, and SteamOS taught me that modern Linux is not super complicated, and now I know that it’s not a huge pain in the ass to troubleshoot because the community isn’t nearly as toxic as I was expecting. So unless I learn of an even better distro for general use, gaming, streaming, audio recording, and video editing, all for somebody who is experienced with Windows and not much else, I’m leaning towards Nobara.
The only real hurdle I have is that it’s hard to justify dumping like $1200-1500 on a computer when I already have a PS5, Steam Deck, and gaming laptop. I really don’t need it.
Depends on what you want to do. I sold my 2 year old gaming laptop and managed to spend 2 months getting amazing bargains on secondhand parts to make an amazing gaming PC. The Steam Deck and that does a great job of streaming the more demanding games from the PC.
The 9 year old laptop might be surprisingly functional if you use something like ZorinOS on it.
I’ll be honest, troubleshooting is still a gigantic pain in the ass sometimes. But if you can get over the hill of setting up the OS, then you’re good to go. The thing that’s made Linux bearable for me is AI. If I have a problem then I write it out in Copilot or ChatGPT, and it usually gives me the solution on the first try with a command o can just paste into terminal.
Tumbleweed, leap or slowroll?
Tumbleweed…and Kubuntu before that…and EndeavourOS before that…and ZorinOS before that…and Linux Mint before that…and Ubuntu before that.
But I’ve finally found Tumbleweed to be the OS to stick with. Although I do sometimes feel tempted to go back and try EndeavourOS now that I know more about Linux.
I waited until the last day of support to upgrade from Windows 7 to 10, I plan on doing the same with Windows 10.
With Windows 10 and 11 Microsoft has been gradually removing control from the user’s hands and I’m still miffed about that.
It’s been a gradual process and I do say that it started with Windows XP. People look at Windows XP with loads of nostalgia, but they conveniently forget how aggravatingly annoying it was with how often it kept prompting you about what you’re about to run. Like with the greyed out screens, asking whether you’re administrator and all that. It started with Windows XP.
And it has gotten worse since to where now this system you’ve paid $900 for that happen to have Windows pre-installed or maybe you bought that separately for another $200, so this $1,100 system you have. You can’t control it all.
I upgraded to 10 and my old laptop with a hard drive became unusable. I got multiple years of Linux from it instead of trashing it.
That’s why I scope out for old laptops from time to time. It’s pointless to hope for it to run today’s Windows OSes. But to write it off as completely useless is stupid when you can throw any desired Linux distro on it.
Though I have noticed that Ubuntu does get harder to run on old laptops.
Yeah, modern Windows and HDDs don’t mix well. I refurbished multiple laptops and each time just throwing in a cheap SSD (and cleaning the cooler + sometimes reapplying thermal paste) would breathe new life into them.
- Windows 95: Good
- Windows 98: Bad
- Windows 98 SE: Good
- Windows ME: Bad
- Windows XP: Good
- Windows Vista: Bad
- Windows 7: Good
- Windows 8: Bad
- Windows 10: Good
- Windows 11: ?
Why are people still surprised?
XP fucking sucked. It wasn’t good until service pack 3.
You skipped 8.1 which was the good version that fixed the stuff that sucked about 8. It’s existence is almost completely forgotten.
Then Windows 10 came out and it was bad.
They then had about a 10 different OS builds that all had the Windows 10 name instead of giving each build a new name or calling them service packs. The OS that exists now (22h2) has almost nothing in common with the OS that came out in 2015.
Windows 11 has also had several major leaps since that name started. What’s current (23h2) is much much different than the OS that came out in 2021.
Windows 2000 is also missing and was probably the last time Microsoft put out an OS that was good from the start rather than sucking on release.
Also the ones listed as bad from Vista onwards simply never got the improvements.
Vista was actually shockingly solid by the end. 7 on release was essentially just Vista Service Pack 3 with a new taskbar skin, because Vista was completely unmarketable by that point and nobody could be convinced to jump to Vista anymore.
I agree with everything you write, but I’ll also add an unpopular opinion as someone who tested the beta version of Vista and hated it: Vista x64 SP2 was a good OS, which solved most of the issues that existed with the OS.
And into this day, it’s the most beautiful Windows UI, at least for me.
You’re missing Windows 2000, but I guess you can argue that’s Windows NT not mainline Windows. That was definitely in the good camp, and I was not alone in sticking with it for many years (until XP got good).
Edit: I see @NickwithaC@lemmy.world beat me to this point.
Windows 95: Good Windows 98: Bad Windows 98 SE: Good Windows ME: Bad Windows XP: ~~Good~~ **GOAT** Windows Vista: Bad Windows 7: Good Windows 8: Bad Windows 10: Good Windows 11: ?Fixed it for you, thanks!
Edit: strikeout not working as expected…
If you include 98SE you should also include 8.1. Or include neither. But then it wouldn’t make sense anymore.
XP SP2 is what everyone remembers, too. It wasn’t very good at release and a lot of people stayed on 2000.
Indeed. Plug and play didn’t (mostly) get figured out until SP2. Drivers were still quite a nightmare at that time.
2000 though was a server version. Not technically consumer.
I can’t really think of a reason why 10 is listed as good, does it actually do something better than 7? Even just graphical interface?
Windows 7 is good compared to Vista, but bad compared to Windows Xp SP 1 or SP 2 (in my memory at least). Windows 10 is good compared to Windows 8, but bad compared to Windows 7.
After a couple more years of MS pushing win 11, we’ll probably get a win 12 that is less good than win 10, but better than win 11, so thanks to people’s short term memory, it will then be considered “good”, but anyone with a memory and some critical thinking ability will recognize it as shite.
we’ll probably get a win 12 that is less good than win 10, but better than win 11,
I wouldn’t count on it. MS is moving away from selling desktop-stuff and towards selling cloud stuff (think azure and office356) and consulting. That’s why they changed their attitude towards linux (think wsl and c# for linux) and open-source (think github). MS wants companies to use open-source tools (preferably written in c#) and deploy them to azure with the help of MS-consultants.
Enshittifying windows is a step in that direction. For example: The more people have a MS-Account, the easier it is to sell office356. That’s why they pressure windows-user into making MS-Accounts.
MS knows that desktop is dying.
I beleive a large issue, and I say this as an old man yelling at kids on my lawn, is the difficulty in learning new systems. Most of those bad ones largely changed how to navigate a pc. Most of the good ones were smaller leaps from the prior bad one. So yes, I’m sure that also means the devs had more time in the current style to smooth it out and fix newly broken features, but it also got people exposed to the new style. A huge problem with 8 was that it went to that tablet tile bullshit. 10 tries to be a tablet too, slightly less so, but now we’re all accepting it as normal. That’s my take, at least as a contributing factor. Whatever was normal in your 20s is the standard for the rest of your life.
I see it with cars. People in my cohort get mad at all the chimey nannies in modern cars, so they yearn for when cars weren’t so inundated with technology. Peak automotive design was 1985-2005. And yet, the adults when we grew up would complain those 90s cars are way too complicated with their electronic engine control models and emissions systems.
I’m going to disagree on this one, at least for me personally using the base functions of the different windows versions was never a problem. Even when completely ignoring the UI changes (including the always increasingly messier system configuration pages), Windows has definitely been regressing.
The user transition from win XP to win 7 was completely smooth for me, it didn’t feel different at all. It’s only after using it a bit that the downsides became obvious: I remember that file search worked less good, they had made a bit of a mess of config screens and the bloat needed more ram. But it came with a smashing chess program. It felt like there was some minor regression, but it wasn’t a trainwreck.
Windows 8 upon first startup was awful since that was the first time that MS wanted to force the user to create a cloud account through dark pattern design. Even if I had not grown up in a time when my operating system did not use dark patterns against me, I would still be pissed off when I encountered it for the first time. Once I got past that hurdle, the Os was usable and problems only emerged when I tried to do more things.
Things like closing a stuck full screen game with task manager, which didn’t work because the new task manager would not come on top. Or the new store app, which installed “apps” that were not “programs” and could fe not be uninstalled in a normal way.
From my first experiences with windows 10 I remember that out of the box you could not control when it would update. That pc would wake up in the middle of the night despite the settings saying that it shouldn’t and I had to dig deep till I found how to make it behave permanently. Then at a later point I also made the mistake of using the recommended OneDrive sync system for my documents folder and nearly lost all my personal files, fortunately I had a backup on an external hard disk. And the main goal of Windows search was no longer to find files, but instead to trick users into opening bing, to boost microsoft quarterly statistics.
Microsoft has been adding more and more dark pattern design into Windows, it’s not a case of “old man yells at clouds”, it has really been getting worse and worse with each new release.
And Microsoft firing their qa team and using their customers as canaries is definitely not helping either. So many issues that should have never gone life.
With 70% of the market share being w10, no, we wont
XP sp1 and 2 were more or less the same as me with an updated UI and non existent 64 bit. However flawed vista was, it added an actual tangible benefit for 7 to further improve on.
I’d argue 7 was the last windows os that could be described as “better” in some way than what came before (which most, even the ones we remember as “bad” at the time, did offer some real step forward which isn’t true for 8/10/11).
XP is based on the NT kernel, and ME is based on the 9X kernel. They are extremely different under the hood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Microsoft_Windows_versions
They put some under-the-hood improvements in 10 that they didn’t put in 7, such as a new display driver model and Directx 12.
But that does not make a difference to most people. Industry desupporting of Windows 7 is the biggest con to it.
Eventually, 10 will share 7’s fate. So you’ll have both 10’s regressions and 11’s and so forth to live with as long as you’re on Windows. You can’t stop Microsoft from desupporting and killing their software in the long run.
Microsoft has a multi-decade history of enshitification when they do not perceive any major threats. Internet Explorer, DirectX, Windows Server, etc. all rotted. Some of these are still active and supported, yes, but they all peaked years ago and are aging poorly. Microsoft doesn’t really do the labor of love thing much when customers are bagged.
Linux may be able to dethrone them to an extent if it can reach an ease of access/UX that most people are comfy with. And it has made huge strides over the years. It can also run most Windows software very well.
Mac is still priced very high and still feature-limited and a 2nd/3rd-class citizen when it comes to platform targeting. Offering lower priced conputers would make them a pretty big threat I think.
I think ChromeOS is a decent threat to Windows but it loses tons of features vs all the other options. At least it is really cheap and easy to use.
Good stopped existing after 7. Only bad and slightly less bad.
Windows 10: Good
People keep repeating that but it’s by far the worst and actually the one that made me bail. What is it that good about it that made it worth sacrificing user choice, privacy, performance, latency, search, startup time, solitaire, and much more?
Too bad win 12 is on track to break the streak.
95 is the best OS of all time.
Why did the emoji picker of W11 get so fucking downgraded?
And the windows+P multi monitor control doesn’t work before login in 11 because it’s part of the taskbar now
Seriously can someone fix this
What a joke 🤣
I have Windows 11 on a couple of machines and honestly it’s just Windows 10 with a somewhat slicker taskbar and control panel. Functionally it is almost identical. I’m sure there is a random bunch of changes on the periphery but it’s really not a compelling proposition if someone has Windows 10 and is happy with it.
Y’all need to get yourselves that Windows 10 2021 LTSC IoT badboy (IoT part is important). It’s supported until 2032 and it’s only bloat is edge. If I had to use windows again it would be that. Maybe it’s downside would be software complaining in the future that the OS is too old, but I would say it’s worth a shot if you have to use Windows.
Oh no, that’s not all actually.
That version doesn’t even have the Windows Store, which is a huge bloat of it’s own. Oh and it doesn’t even stop there, apparently Microsoft treats even their Pro-users like trash nowadays, that you have full control of what you do on the Win10 2021 LTSC/LoT as opposed to the Pro version and it costs more.
I was going to ask how WSL gets installed without the Windows Store, but looks like the install path doesn’t use the store anymore. That was one of the few things I ever used the store for.
Yall need to just install linux.
Working on it, but only on page 5 of Linux for dummies
You most certainly don’t need a book and I can almost guarantee you that the book is already out of date and irrelevant.
Just dig in and get dirty and figure it out.
If I had an extra machine I totally would fafo, but alas I must approach with caution.
You don’t need a whole machine, just a VM.
Haven’t got to that chapter yet. 🙂
Haaa
Just get ltsc image from Microsoft and crack it. Its much less of a hassle
You can switch from Windows 10 pro into that?
At a cost. But mind as well pirate since Microsoft is so eager to shove people to Windows 11.
I couldn’t find a version of this that would work in a VM. The few I tried were “preactivated” and then complained about hardware changes when I tried to install in a VM.
No I’m not asking people to find me a working release. I’m just complaining that I just can’t be assed mucking around with unlicensed installations.
the last time I had to set up a windows-system, I just said fuck-it and bought a key for 2€ from on of these shady key-sides.
Yeah I bought some keys a while back.
It never seems to be as easy as “type in this key”. They get linked to my Microsoft account or some nonsense.
Linux doesn’t require AcTiVaTiOn
