- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]

I don’t know if it’s funny or frustrating that everything people are complaining about with Windows 11 are the exact same things we were complaining about with every previous version of Windows from 95 to 10: lack of control, limited configuration and bugs. Yes, Linux was super raw and difficult back then but we still switched and worked hard to make it better. I think all the articles encouraging people to switch today are missing simple “Thank you”.
The difference is more dramatic now. Linux isn’t so finicky, largely thanks to hard work but also to Windows’ feature stagnation, meaning Linux isn’t a “few years behind” like before. Imagine the situation if, say, Microsoft hadn’t completely screwed up UWP.
Meanwhile, users subconsciously ignored a lot of junk with 95, Vista, 8, whatever. But that’s much harder to ignore in 11.
But the comparison is different now, Linux on the desktop is better and Windows is worse.
For example, if you turn off a bunch of telemetry options instead of stopping sending data it stops collecting it. That sounds subtle but it matters. It breaks functionality that has existed for >20 years, simple things like remembering what the last command was in the run dialogue when you open it.
I know that linux is the popular answer to this problem.
I use a Mac and it’s a pretty good machine. I know it isn’t for everyone, but it works well enough for me and has enough mainstream support. As well the hardware has gotten ’ good enough’
MacOS is not hostile to me when I want to run and install programs. There is some opensource support on the platform and the a good amount of closed source programs.
I do miss the wide ranging PnP hardware support for things like SAS/LTO
I think it’s not hard to understand how MacOS is easily better than Windows. I don’t think Apple is enshittifying quite as fast as Microsoft, if at all.
Is there real time support communities around wine? I have some software that doesn’t work. (X-tool Studio, not yet in WineHQ).
It looks like winehq has a few IRC channels. Never tried any of them myself though: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/IRC
If Windows crosses a the threshold of “major OEMs start shipping Linux,” what happens to windowscentral?
Do they split the staff/site to a linuxcentral? Winecentral?
I detest this company for many reasons, it’s like they go out of their way to make dealing with them as painful as possible.
Here’s just one example I discovered today. I have a Windows 10 VM I needed to upgrade to 11 but the “PC Health Check” app says no, the i5 processor isn’t supported.
I can, however, create a new VM and install 11 on the exact same hardware, so that’s what I did, along with a whole bunch of extra work to get the new VM set up the same as the old Windows 10 VM was.
Why? Because fuck you, that’s why.
Assholes.
There is a way to upgrade directly. I got this from Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/1afu0uj/is_it_safe_to_install_windows_11_on_my_microsoft/
It works fine - you just won’t get the more advanced security features available in more recent laptops.
- Boot up into Windows 10
- ensure you have 30GB free space
- Download the .iso: https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11
- right-click the .iso and select “mount” to create a virtual DVDROM
- create a new folder on your main system drive and copy all the files from the virtual DVDROM
- start a command-prompt
- navigate to the folder where you copied all the files
- run the following:
.\sources\setupprep.exe /product server
This will not actually install the server version of windows but will bypass the CPU check so that you can install Win11 on an unsupported CPU. The actual version of Windows installed will depend on the version of Win10 you have: Pro, Home, or Enterprise, for example.
Thank you for this. I already did a fresh install but it’s interesting that your link is to the Surface subreddit just to rub some more salt in the wound. The processor is officially supported for upgrades only if it’s in Microsoft’s hardware. I hate them so much.
This is how i feel about 98% of Azure. Its just so needlessly complicated, with incomprehensible defaults, and out of date documentation, and APIs that just fail silently.
So much this. I actually pulled all of our servers from Azure and went back to a regular provider. Way cheaper as well.
Luckily i keep not running into the issues, Its mostly the unwanted windows features that seem to irritate me (f off onedrive and copilot) I keep trying to swap but I found what im good at finally and it is bricking linux installs.
Switch to Windows LTSC. Doesn’t have copilot, no store, no onedrive, no candy crush and tiktok on a fresh install, and no need to figure out an account bypass.
Its the closest thing to what Windows was up to Windows 7 of a boring OS that you use to launch programs without it trying to be helpful or encourage you to login to an account.
And looking like they are impossible to solve. It seems that the OS is more and more a black box of vibe coding and marketing wank as time passes.
I ignore them from Linux land. :)
Frankly I’ve never had any issues running Windows 11. It’s just the OS in the background for me. I think the biggest difference is I always run Enterprise versions (not Pro or Home) and most of that crap is either non-existent, disabled by default or easy to disable via GPO.
The big thing for people to realize is that Enterprise is the version most all businesses (especially large ones) run, and Microsoft isn’t going to crap on them as easily. And they know by extension, people will run what their business is, but they can get away with making Pro and Home crappier since it’s just individuals who would switch, not large swaths.
Pro and Home is where they test-market the worst of the garbage… some of it does make it into Enterprise - a surprising amount has gotten into Office 365 - but, yeah, not enough to make it completely dysfunctional.
Lol its amazing how Noone in the real world knows that microsoft makes OS’s without all the enshitification shit in them that run decent, dont block features from being disabled, are all around non-infuriating piles of shit like the non-enterprise versions, charge an arm and a leg for it. Then microsoft (or at the same time didnt mean one before the other) releases the functionally identical OS versions but so facefucked full of enshitification shit they constantly break, these versions hold you down with an update pistol in your mouth that tells you inorder to live you will update every fucking shitstorm we tell you to, it rapes yo wife, rapes yo kids, ignores all bugs calling them features, all the while having a bomb strapped to their chest that says you dont accept everything we ruin of yours we blow your whole fucking system sky high. And those versions they call Home and Pro versions.
My company (130,000 employees) sticks to 24H2. IT wouldn’t approve the 25H2. Don’t know whether the refusal to upgrade hurts Microsoft in any way, but if it does, I think we’re big enough to be on their radar, and perhaps they talk to our IT about concerns and complaints we may have.
I had a few issues with 25H2 on release, but they’re largely fixed now.
24H2 and 25H2 are the same thing, it’s just enabling a few different changes. But things like the new obnoxiously ugly start menu have started showing on my 24H2 machines so I don’t really know what the difference is.
So Microsoft is so diversified, 130K isn’t even a drop to them. We had almost 200K seats of E3 and when I calculated out the revenue from our EA vs their total revenue, it came up to something like 0.012%. Even though it was tens of millions of dollars on our end, we’re still a drop in the bucket to them.
This is the issue I have with people talking about how “you MUST always run the most up to date software”. They don’t understand that in large enterprise it is common for function and security to not update unless there is a damn good reason. The very idea that the newest version is the best is just marketing brainwashing and does not hold up to the reality of use.
Thank you! Lemmy is a bunch of people bitching about their brand name laptop running a garbage version of Windows and loaded with factory crapware.
But hey, they get to come here and comment smugly about Linux. Meanwhile, I haven’t read a single article talking about an issue I’ve actually seen, at home or office.
Are you upset at people criticizing Microsoft? Is that the point you are trying to make?
I was criticizing MS before most of lemmy was fucking born. But can you see what I’m saying?
“Never had these issues, not once.”
Lemmy: “Fuck you! Yes you have! You’re not in our tribe!” (Also lemmy: Only idiot conservatives defend their tribe no matter what.)
Can you see how insane that is from my perspective? Installed Windows 10 on this SSD 8-years ago. Moved that SSD through 3 or 4 PCs and upgraded to 11, no problems.
Then there was a very similar thread about people trying to switch to Linux:
“As soon as I get $basic_driver working, I can finally switch!”
Been running Linux servers for 20-years. I never use MS unless there’s a compelling reason, IIS or some bullshit. But the Linux desktop is still a clusterfuck.
“It’s awesome if you use $distro with $desktop! You’ll have problems with $x, $y and $z, but you can fix that by [command line work].”
“OK. I can make Windows go with a base ISO and some PowerShell. No ads, no horseshit, start menu is flawless.”
“Look at this idiot that has to use a CLI to make his OS work!”
These people are like atheists that just learned you don’t have to believe in god.
Which is, by the way, totally ok. If you buy an expensive computer and it is getting shipped with a garbage version of an OS that is something to complain about. It’s also totally reasonable to complain that there is a garbage version at all. People shouldn’t need to reinstall their brand new computers with pirated enterprise versions to escape the abuses of Microsoft. At least let us bitch about this here, dude!
Pirated? You may not be aware, but you can download Windows ISOs straight from Microsoft. The second you boot your machine and register it, the license is permanent and you can install Windows forever.
If retail laptops came with enterprise or the upgrade to enterprise was free or the home and pro versions had the same minimal crapware as enterprise then you might have a point.
But that isn’t the case and Linux is still free and not full of shit so the smugness is mostly justified and you’re mostly wrong.
I like how taskbar buttons dynamically resize depending on window title. I like that the size of the buttons on the taskbar are all different, and I like not having a way to change this back to the boring obvious tried-and-true standard of having buttons that are all the same size.
I like that the rules appear to not make any fucking sense, leading to situations where you can have 3 entries for the same program with the same content open that are all different sizes.

I like it because it takes me out of whatever I’m doing and forces me to notice the user interface. I like getting distracted by little hints of movement at the bottom of the screen that make me stop and go “wait what the fuck did it just do”.
I like that when I last searched for “windows 11 taskbar button resize disable”, the only mention of the word “disable” on the first page of search results was this:

I like having to put “site:reddit.com” at the end of my search query before I can even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
And I like having to ultimately give up and live with it because at the end of the day, it’s a feature and not a bug.
I like having to put “site:reddit.com” at the end of my search query before I can even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
kagi.com solved this problem for me.
deleted by creator
Why in the world do you have titles of the taskbar?!
Ungrouped buttons with titles is very efficient for me, too. I grew up with Windows 95 (that was the default behaviour back then) and my brain can handle this really well. I despise grouped buttons I have to hover over to see the actual windows and the icons only mode makes the clickable area too small and annoying to navigate to.
I grew up with that too, but the only time I’ve had any sort of slowdown from grouped icons is when I’ve been juggling like 4 excel sheets. I don’t often find myself with that many instances of the same program open often enough for it to matter.
It was an adjustment at first back in… Windows 7 I think, but I really haven’t missed it since.
Yeah it took me a bit after 7 came out. But having all my excel windows in one group is way more efficent than two excel windows over here, one in the middle, and a 4th way off at the end of all my windows.
Visibility and accessibility of windows, without the need to expand a group or neutral icon.
I am really wondering this too. Seems like people just love making the user experience harder for themselves because “that’s what I grew up with”.
Ha! It’s 2026 now. Those problems can easily be ignored as they are all in the past.
I love the smell of pedantry in the morning
One of the best feelings for me ever was when I cancelled my Micro$oft account after switching to Mint.
The freshness is real.
This generation of software companies really seem to have abandoned all previous goals for “Let’s see how shit we can make this!”
“Sir, if we can finish our robot it could help with any household chores and even take over most of the care work for the elderly. Then in future patches we could make it waterboard the user unless they get the waterboardless premium subscription. Then we’ll increase the cost and slowly reintroduce waterboarding even for subscribers.”
You are now VP of product development at Microsoft. Congratulations.
P.S. Get a bullet proof vest and car.
Doesn’t stop a homemade drone and a fragmentation payload. Or for that matter, a rigged car or location.
You are now VP of product development at Alphabet. Congratulations.
P.S. Entrance details to your bunker will be sent shortly via seperate means.
This guy assassinates.
Some of the issues described in the article must be driving corporate IT departments insane. They thrive on consistent installations across machines. Having each one offering different features (even temporarily) is the opposite of that.
Any IT department worth their salt will have solved this problem years ago. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never managed Windows in an enterprise setting but there’s a reason that profit-hungry corporations all use Windows. Here’s the full process for getting any Windows laptop to work perfectly:
- unbox the laptop and turn it on
- insert the USB key with the provisioning package
- wait about two seconds for Windows to tell you to remove the USB key.
- go to lunch
If they have a channel supplier that offers ‘white glove’ service they don’t even need to do that and they can even have brand new laptops drop-shipped to a user at home without ever needing to touch it. And if that laptop fucks up down the line it can just be wiped and as soon as Windows connects to the Internet it can automatically re-enrol itself into the organisation’s management system.
With PXE boot you don’t even need a USB. Boot into the imaging “OS” over the network.
My workplace has a couple of dedicated network switches on a dedicated “imaging” VLAN in the hardware room, that way normal users can’t accidentally reimage their own machine. I think the desktop guys can get 32 going at once, and the complete automated setup time for one is like 40 minutes.
I’m currently losing the fight with my second level (whom supplies our PXE server) about keeping it. They tried setting it up twice since September, the first worked the first time I used it, then never again after that. The second never worked as far as I can tell. They say that it’s “being depreciated”, and therefore should be dropped.
The group policy management has a lot of options. You can control automatic and manual behavior, or do the whole update delivery yourself. Of course, that all comes with effort and investment into administration and management.
Just imagine how many tutorials, documentations, videos and so on Microsoft has made obsolete by just moving the start menu from the lower left side to the middle. And yes, you totally can’t expect users to find the new position on their own, some people are interesting














