It’s like when people in abusive relationships suddenly realize that their partner doesn’t actually care about them, and everyone around them is like “Yeah, no shit. Fucking leave their ass.”
Microsoft is constantly experimenting with how far they can push users into a corner and get away with it. There might be a day when Microsoft caves and releases a Windows that is more like what we wanted, but I imagine it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. We have not yet seen the worst MS has to offer force upon us.
At this point, I have lost count of the number of times that I’ve left my perfectly working Windows computer at the end of my work day, only to return to a completely broken computer that won’t boot the next morning.
I find this to either be a lie or self inflicted. I manage a small fleet of a few hundred windows systems and all updates have been fine for years.
In the windows admin user groups there are more than a few that are deploying updates within 24hrs of release to thousands of servers and workstations and have not reported issues.
Lastly I think that tech bloggers say things like this to get clicks, so they can get ad revenue. Then they also tell you how to disable updates so they can get more clicks and ad revenue.
It’s disingenuous and probably harmful to be telling people to disable updates that lead them to be exposed to vulnerabilities.
The interesting thing for me is that I own two different surface pro 7 tablets. I have one for work and one for home (now that work doesn’t require me to bring my own device anymore). The work surface has windows 10 pro on it. My home one doesn’t, The difference is very interesting. The IT team have disabled a lot of stuff on my work surface that I don’t even have access to on my home unit. I don’t often have bugs from updates breaking things at work. I do at home though which is enough for me to perhaps upgrade the windows key on my home unit someday. If I don’t install linux first which is a possibility.
That’s the difference between the Home and Pro versions though. The things that generally break on the Home versions are all the things not generally enabled on a domain controlled Pro version. Thisbis more about Microsoft just being bad at small updates versus these giant roundup packages they like to ship.
It's kind of disingenuous of you to proudly say, "I don't use the same version of Windows that this person likely does and I don't have the same issues that this person does so they must be full of shit".
There are vast differences between Windows home and Windows pro and Windows Enterprise editions as far as how easy it is to control and block off the annoyance ware that Microsoft builds into it.
If you use deployment software to roll out your images after standardizing them and have a set image that you can deploy to a thousand computers as easily as one then it's very simple to sign in with a local domain account and disable the windows things through a group policy and just start rocking and rolling whereas your average Windows home user is not going to even have access to GPO and we'll have to tediously for each and every single computer every single time they reset it redo all of the things to disable all of Microsoft's crap activation.
They are not entirely different but definitely distinct versions of Windows and dismissing the home and non-enterprise users that their experience is inferior to your experience on the Enterprise side is what I'm saying is disingenuous
It’s kind of a wide disparity for something that’s so locked down, though. It’s not as though one person is saying they get occasional issues and the other is they often have issues… it’s one person basically saying their own personal computer is nigh unusable and the other providing an example of a large number of examples of that being extremely unlikely…
It’s far more likely this individual is fucking up their computer on a regular basis, or has a very high bar of usability that is broken any time there is even the slightest hiccup or inconvenience.
While I agree with most of what you’re saying, it’s also stupid to blame Microsoft for breaking your computer if you forcefully uninstall the Windows store, despite the fact that it’s needed for parts of certain updates.
A lot of the “debloaters” have no fucking idea what they’re actually doing and are uninstalling/disabling critical parts of the OS so the task manager shows less RAM usage (because God forbid you actually use your damn RAM).
Hard to figure out. Have to settle for similar but different apps. Video drivers not built in. Inconsistant bluetooth. Update all breaks everything. Hard to get support for your individual set-up when Linux is so fractured.
Which part? The one where to install an app, instead of downloading a .exe you search for the app in the package manager?
Have to settle for similar but different apps.
That’s not exclusive to Linux though. Like for example moving to MacOS you wouldn’t really expect for all the apps to work either?
Video drivers not built in.
Video drivers aren’t built into Windows either? And on Linux, AMD’s drivers are (as I understand it), and for Nvidia, you’ll probably have Noveau installed.
Inconsistent bluetooth.
How? I’ve found BT to just work on Linux, while on Windows I had to track down the specific drivers.
Update all breaks everything.
Unless you installed Arch (or any rolling release distro) as your first distro, this probably won’t be an issue.
Hard to get support for your individual set-up when Linux is so fractured.
Then maybe install Mint, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS or anything more widespread that does have the support you want?
Ah, I see. So because YOU understand something, and know what you’re doing, and haven’t had anything fail on YOU, then it must be everybody ELSES fault, right? Meanwhile Linux has less than 5% of PC userbase, and that INCLUDES Chromebooks.
I don’t think it’s even fairly controversial to say that Windows over the last couple of versions have turned into an unmitigated privacy dumpster fire, and only looking to get worse, and MacOS is and always has been a walled garden which offers very little in the way of customization or individuality.
Yet despite all that, Linux only has about 4% marketshare, because nobody is able to use it. But hey, must be 95% of societys fault, and not the direct result of a confusing to use interface, right? And if YOUR bluetooth works fine, and doesn’t refuse to connect at random until you restart, that must be something I’m making up and doesn’t exist, right?
Man. That’s some weak-sauce arguments against linux. In my experience, just a default Mint install with no stuffing around of any kind came with fully-functional video drivers and bluetooth. No update has ever broken anything; and the first thing that launches after a fresh install is a menu with bunch of different ways to get personal support for Mint.
I don’t like Ubuntu that much but one thing they really do right is a tool that made installing the few drivers not built into the kernel stupid easy. That’s the number one thing I see people mess up with Nvidia drivers. You always install Nvidia drivers through your distro app store/package manager never the website.
I understand the mistake but it’s painful to see someone manually install Nvidia drivers from their website just for it to shit the bed in a kernel update.
I’m sure the update manager was probably very important back in the day but I am glad updates come through the software manager now. Even though I don’t use it it’s very intuitive.
When I installed Mint my entire video screen was tinted blue. Bluetooth sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t. People yelled at me for having a Dell PC in support forums, and when I followed the advice of someone trying to help, he suggested to update all, and when I did the fans stopped working.
Hmm. I’d be interested to see that. I just did a brief search of the support forum for your post, but didn’t find it. Perhaps you can post the link here. Your account history will have it.
This was 10 years ago on the mint forums. My username would have probably been Lost-My-Mind unless the forum disallowed special characters. In which case it’s LostMyMind, and if that was taken when I signed up, it was LostMyMlnd (using a lowercase L instead of an i)
If anything, the last 8 years has made it worse! I’ve had this handle since 2001, and BIG HAT since 1997. But BIG HAT became increasingly harder and harder to get screen names of.
Huh. I find windows way harder to figure out. I guess it depends on DE, but Windows is kinda just layers of cruft, with old confusing menus mixed with newer ones, installing apps in particular is a confusing mess.
Updates breaking things I guess depends on distro. If you go with something like Arch you’re gonna have a bad time, but that’s on you for installing Arch. If you installed Debian or something, stuff will break faaaar less often than with Windows.
Video drivers not being built in is an odd one, because… they aren’t in Windows, but are in Linux, assuming you use AMD or Intel. With Nvidia it’s usually a case of typing in “Nvidia” in your software centre, clicking install, then being done.
Support can be hard or easy, that’s very true. Although most stuff I see in terms of windows support is “have you tried a system restore? Oh it didn’t work? Ok reinstall Windows then”, which isn’t very helpful at all.
It’s much easier nowadays. I find Windows much more hard to figure out now that I’ve made the switch. At the very least, everything in Linux takes very few steps to perform tasks and install programs compared to Windows.
Have to settle for similar but different apps.
The sooner you do it, the faster you’ll be free. Once you do, you can be confident that said program won’t undergo enshitification since it’s open source. That said some apps can’t be replaced like Photoshop if it’s for work. I like Gimp, but I understand it’s not for everyone.
Video drivers not built in.
It pretty much is now if you install an Nvidia specific distro. AMD is preferable of course.
Inconsistant bluetooth.
Totally fair.
Update all breaks everything.
Use a rolling release distro like Debian or Fedora and you should be fine.
Linux is not perfect, but it’s better than Windows. Nobody will force you to use your computer in a way you don’t want to. It’s so awesome and it’s free. There is no way I’ll ever go back to Windows. Linux is the ideal OS for so many people (especially those who go the extra mile to modify Windows heavily) they just don’t know it yet.
The primary issues that I faced with Windows (Win10 nearly a decade ago) are
very slow updates
constant 100% disk usage after boot
high background process usage
[Rare] messing with my dual partition setup
The final error which caused me to format my PC -> After logging in, the desktop froze, no icons showing up, no task manager.
If I had never used Linux, these wouldn’t even seem like problem; just normal Windows shenanigans. But after using Linux, I can never go back. I don’t know how much worse/better Win11 is now but can’t be bothered to try.
My biggest issue with Windows (at least on my desktop) is with my GPU driver for my Intel Arc A770 LE. Windows Update will not stop automatically “updating” my driver to a driver that was made about a year and a half ago. It’s too old that Intel Arc Control doesn’t even work with it. It doesn’t matter how I install the latest driver from Intel, I can DDU the old one, install the driver and wipe all custom configurations or just install it normally. Nothing works, upon the next reboot, it automatically says “there’s an update” and installs regardless if I want it or not. The driver installation also has a 50/50 chance of blue screening my whole system when installing, both the installation from Windows update, and from Intel. The Window driver “updates” for my driver have also just happened randomly with no notice, they’ve occurred during hour long Blender renders, crashing it and wasting hours of my time redoing work. (This is all on Windows 10). It is frustrating to deal with
Meanwhile, my Linux install on the same computer just runs mesa and I’ve had no issues at all with my GPU. (Or any issues with drivers really, it all just works).
Although it didn’t “kill” my computer. Whenever I still used Windows, it would spontaneously install this outdated driver which would either blue screen or crash whatever I was in the middle of doing such as working in Blender, playing a game, etc.
“I’ve never experienced what you describe, so it must be either imagined or your own fault.”
I’ve seen this nonsense over and over again in communities of all kinds, most often in tech forums (where there are always a few participants suffering from a big-fish-little-pond effect). It’s a very rude and foolish bit of human behavior.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
My two cents, I could say the same as the author. My Windows work laptop most of the times cannot wake up from sleep (you know, opening the lid after it's closed) so I have to force a restart. There's a 50% or less chance that Bluetooth and WiFi won't work at all (they won't be displayed on Windows, like it's not even a feature) after I turn the laptop on, so most of my pre-work morning is restarting the laptop until it's working as intended. It's the third laptop I got from them, they're different models but they're all HP, and they all had problems. The Macs and the same HP laptops running Linux have none of these issues.
It's not harmful to tell average people who run windows to disable updates, because you can't disable the updates as a single-license scrub.
(Theres usually some hacky bullshit to delay or block updates, but they break constantly and you have to keep finding new ones, because Microsoft thinks of their userbase as stupid babies who can't be trusted with their own hardware).
Also, you live in your own personal slice of Windows control with your hundreds/thousands of systems being managed with group policies. I have no doubt that you don't see issues, because your company chose a few models of laptop or desktop and know how they'll react to the updates. You can turn off the annoying shit, and choose specific updates at specific times. Microsoft doesn't want to piss off their corporate customers, especially the ones with massive spending contracts with Dell/HP/Lenovo.
Thing is, outside of you - and your groups of other corporate windows admins - the general user (with varied hardware/software configurations) don't have the safety of catching issues on a few test machines and delaying a deploy to the fleet, or even the option to delay updates at all, and they're screwed over constantly by random broken drivers, system setting that aren't respected between updates, and bloat/backdoors that you can't opt out of.
It is you who is being disingenuous, by suggesting that the windows update system has no flaws, because you operate in an extremely controlled environment with tons of safeguards and - ironically - way more autonomy.
My personal devices haven’t had the issues described either and I install a lot of different software and hardware. I’ve also supported a lot of friends and family. I didn’t want to bog down my comment with my own blog post.
I can kind of feel the author on this. I’m in charge of a lot of “special projects” at work that basically come down to, “figure out a way to replicate this extremely expensive technology or software using low cost or free alternatives”. It ends up being an unholy mix of programs and hardware that is held together with duct tape and super glue and any minor perturbation means something breaks.
There have been two distinct Windows updates in recent memory that have broken things.
The one that stopped network printers from working, and you had to change a specific GPO setting which was not available in Intune at the time, meaning I had to do it manually on each computer.
The one that removed all shortcuts to Office 365 apps from the desktop and start menu, necessitating a repair… manually on each affected machine.
So it does happen on occasion. It’s not as bad as in the XP days, but it still can be a little sketchy at times
I’ve been using windows 11 since general release and have had zero issues. Not with ads, not with updates, not with one drive. Well, unless you count clicking away pop-ups to use new features from time to time. Not once has a file been saved to onedrive.
I‘ve had several faulty Windows updates in recent years and my machine is pre-built. And going by the threads I sifted through in search of solutions I am far from the only one. It‘s perfectly fine to not have the newest update at all times so as long as you update once a month when you can afford a potential faulty update. Having an older than most recent version is far from your biggest concern regarding security. I would even say it‘s a non-issue compared to good old fishing mails.
The “1000 and 1 Microsoft sucker lament” genre again.
One would think in a “technology” community people would be sharing mostly articles about some cool-working things, and news would be something supplementary.
I know that I haven’t submitted a single post here, but just WTF.
I just got a new laptop and was genuinely gonna try windows 11 and wsl for my coding needs. But in first boot, it demands internet to do updates. Ok, I connect to coffee shop wifi. Nope, won’t do it because it can’t handle the click through screen to accept wifi ToS. Fine. I take it home, where my Internet is great but has a glitch where it drops out for a few seconds now and then. Turns out that windows will literally cancel updating and demand I reconnect and restart for the kind of drop that I barely notice day to day. So I gave up, plugged in my ArchLinux thumb drive, and mkfs.ext4 before rsyncing my entire old computer to it
I switched all of my Windows systems over to Windows 10 LTSC a few months ago, and it’s been a game-changer. I still get security updates, but no advertisements, bloat, or new “features.” I believe it’s supported until 2032.
After that, I’ll probably switch my remaining systems over to Linux, but until then, it’s not half bad.
You got it the wrong way round. It’s awful because it is the most popular os. If you look back at Windows XP or 7, they were clean, consistent and a pleasure to use. Everybody had XP, then 7 and by then it was too late and everybody was used to it and Microsoft can do whatever they want now and people will just take it because they’ve always used Windows. No need to put in effort.
Hahaha. Oh man, I needed that laugh. Thanks. 🥲 This is a one way journey until all computers look and behave like smartphones. Hopefully I’ll have dementia by then so I won’t remember how amazing computers used to be.
I ran ltsc for a few months… Then I found it didn’t have simple stuff like the camera app? I forget why, but there was one all I really needed that I didn’t have, so after fighting trying to install it, I just want back to Windows pro. I might give windows enterprise a try though.
I don’t understand why this meme [template] exists. Did they rocket this guy up there to shoot him? Why would be be in space if he couldn’t be trusted with the truth?
I think the original showed the earth being a flat disk and the first astronaut says “it’s really flat?” And the second one says “always has been”. But is about to shoot him to keep the knowledge of it safe from the masses.
But in this case, the one with the gun is Microsoft.
I wonder how many years until all mainstream websites and web based apps like steam refuse to work because you’re os isn’t supported by the latest browser version.
I mean they don’t need drm if updated requirements can’t be met by the host system. Steam stopped officially supporting windows 7 because of some core platform security libraries that is needed for newer versions of chrome just doesn’t exist on windows 7 and won’t because windows 7 is EOL.
Most people believe they will start seeing problems where there were none before. They need to invest time into research about their use-cases, which is a cost even before switching.
The typical user used Windows since before they became scared of change, so that’s what they’ll stick with.
The pain of using Windows still can and will be higher without the majority of people switching to anything.
The typical user used Windows since before they became scared of change, so that’s what they’ll stick with.
In some ways this was me, then win 11 came around and I really didn’t like it, and it was pretty unstable for me, so I was stuck between two options for change, neither being what I would call “comfortable” (I had to, win 10 was blue screening literally every other day) which was when I saw the steam deck announcement, (also the LTT Linux Challenge) and I haven’t given win 11 a serious try sense
I don’t want to point fingers/cast shade or anything. Hell, I myself resist change where I can.
It costs incredible amounts of energy and time to change, and that change might even be counter productive to some or most of the things you do.
Gratulations on starting Linux, I hope it does everything you need it to do. Even if you should end up using it only for a short amount of time, I hope the experience enriches you.
Yes, because I need Adobe to do my meh wage part-time job in developing country from my one and only working laptop and I don’t have the luxury of surplus money, time, and mental energy to do anything about it.
But I get your point. If I have the means, I will fix my broken Thinkpad and definitely install Linux there the first chance I get. Either that or Adobe finally release Linux version, which will probably be released after Half-Life 3.
I can’t wait to try Endeavor (so I can finally be an obnoxious person who say “I used Arch^-based^ ^distro^, btw”)
Either that or Adobe finally release Linux version, which will probably be released after Half-Life 3.
Yeah, I’ve seen what Adobe’s support looks like. I remember the Linux version of Flash Player. The guy in charge of it whined on the official Adobe blog on the subject that he had to support “minority browsers” which at the time was everything but Internet Explorer on Windows.
What I am saying is that if Illustrator breaks on Windows, you might have to reinstall Windows. If it breaks on Linux, you just reinstall in a new wine prefix, or restore from a backup or snapshot. The rest of the system remains unaffected. Does that make sense?
Not really. If illustrator breaks on Windows at the most I’ll have to power cycle the PC. I’ve never heard of it taking Windows down with it.
To even get it functional on wine I’d have to invest untold hours of research and tomfoolery, and then any time it didn’t work I’d not know if it was adobe’s fault or wine’s.
I wouldn’t mind doing this kind of thing for a hobby, but not for production software unfortunately.
It’s not a failure to consider the alternatives that slows adoption, it is the very real material problems with those alternatives.
It’s not fair that a multinational corporation gets to wield virtually limitless power to starge the alternatives of oxygen and create as much friction as possible in the process, but it is very real, and blaming the users won’t solve anything.
The comment I replied to didn’t source their claim that it’s the users’ fault, but I notice you didn’t ask them to source their claims.
Perhaps you could explain why your skepticism is so selective before I answer your question.
And perhaps you could be more specific about what claim you want “sourced”. That the switch to linux has a lot of friction? That it’s difficult? That Microsoft has deliberately cultivated that friction? That users aren’t simply failing to consider it? That blaming the users isn’t the solution?
I didn’t notice or care about their comment, it was meaningless bs. Yours is something for which it’s feasible to provide evidence, it’s a novel claim, and I saw nothing to back it up other than hostility.
That the switch to linux has a lot of friction? That it’s difficult?
Everyone mostly agrees on this, not interesting. Also you didn’t even directly claim this in your post, so obviously I wasn’t asking about this. You’re just seemingly using this hostile badgering approach to stifle the conversation.
That Microsoft has deliberately cultivated that friction?
This is the interesting claim. After all Linux deliberately shoots its legs off every few years, why does Microsoft need to help?
Honestly your original question was so vague and terse I almost didn’t reply, it just seemed so pointless. If you don’t want hostility, don’t come with an attitude like that. Do the work to make yourself understood the first time. And don’t just demand citations - you’re not my professor. Just ask questions like a normal fucking person. Ask for information.
Given you’re asking for evidence of Microsoft’s sabotaging of open source projects including Linux, I’m going to have to assume you’re coming from a place of actual curiosity and not bad faith. It’s actually one of the most famous examples of anticompetitive behaviour in history. Start there: en.wikipedia.org/…/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis…
I used to help maintain a Linux distro, and there is a level of polish Windows has that I feel cannot be reached by the FOSS ecosystem due the resources dumped into hiring dedicated teams at MS. Microsoft has tons of money. I’m sad about the direction of windows, but it generally works pretty well for how it’s designed (which is in some cases awful).
Sure. I could accept hearing “Windows is more polished than most Linux distro’s”. But to say blankly that Windows is polished is crazy talk. It’s jank as balls. Its got like 3 totally discrete and independent UI frameworks for the menus operating in parallel, and somehow none of them provide all the functionality you would need, have to mix and match them.
That’s just a single example. I could rant for hours.
there was a time where that may have been the case, but microsoft has been chipping away at any polish they had for years. sure there’s still some rough edges in linux, but it’s only getting better where windows continues to get worse
A good amount of Linux distros don’t seem to want to get the basics down. Constant churn vs stable but way out of date is more how is describe the choice, while windows at it’s core is actually a pretty stable platform. I don’t have to, for example, get annoyed at Firefox middle mouse scroll not working because I forgot this distro still defaults to x11 even though it installs Wayland too blah blah blah.
Firefox middle mouse scroll works fine in X11. I use it all the time. But I guess that’s beside the point; I’m sure we could come up with a different example.