Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:46 Sponsor: TuxCare Radar
02:23 Windows 11 is failing right now
05:20 What’s the job of an OS?
06:51 Updates break systems. Often.
10:53 You have to adapt to it
15:14 It’s highly intrusive
17:44 Debloating tools don’t make it good
20:19 Windows fails at being an OS
21:33 Alternatives are better, but not perfect
27:23 Windows is a sales platform, not an OS
It failed. It’s not failing. The fact that it’s still widely used doesn’t make it successful.
I’m a it ops manager and it’s going to take me years to undo the ball of yarn left by their previous ms certified “professionals” . Ms stack allowed them to be easily hacked last year and I’ve no intention of having that be a me problem.
Can I trademark Sloperating System?
I think GN beat you to it
I’m a linux user but this is so cringe.
I know this is a Linux space, and I love Linux but my Windows 11 box runs just fine. I haven’t had any problems with it.
This year alone I had to reinstall 3 Windows systems that were failing to work. Then again, my Windows 11 work laptop also seems to work just fine.
Sounds like gambling
Well that sucks. I hope everything keeps running from now on.
I use MacOS and Win11 every single day. I used Linux for a long time, I still have my CD I got from Canonical with Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake LTS. Naturally, fanboys of all three will talk about each as if it were the obvious choice. IMHO they’re all good in their own respective ways. It’s a Venn diagram made up of adoption/support, simplicity, and openness.
Then you’re lucky. Win11 virtually pushed me to Linux, I was a windows fanboy before.
Windows 10 was the last actual Microsoft OS.
I’m not a fanboy, I just use whatever works
I don’t think it was implied you were.
Yea Linux users don’t seem to value their time. I spent every other evening for a week trying to install fedora. Multiable downloads, different pen drives, formatting using fadoras own tool. I even tried with a different PC. Nothing. Read the forms to see if there is any known issue. Nobody’s got time for that. I’m back with Linux mint on my gaming setup. It hasn’t had that many issues. But the gaslighting people seem to say Linux will run on anything with any thing makes me miss trust anything those people say. I don’t want a suprise failed update or to spend an evening working out the low level boot issue.
What was your problem? I really cannot understand, it should be as easy as downloading the ISO, plugging the flashdrive and then tell to a software like rufus to flash the ISO to the pen drive, you then go in the bootloader, change the boot priority to pen drives and then reboot the PC and should start the installation (or if the distro has the “live enviroment” you can first try out the distro without installing and then install when you feel ready)
I spent every other evening for a week trying to install fedora.
Skill issue.
Yes, that’s the point, very astute of you. It takes time and knowledge to get good at stuff like this.
Once. It takes time and energy once, because its a new thing. This is true of all new things. If you want to go to a new library, you have to learn the route or address, drive there, get a new card, and find the books/places things are. The dewey decimal system is the same, but no ones really using it and the help desk is likely in a different area.
So, with installing a new operating system, you need to know how to install an operating system, follow the instructions, and then use the operating system.
Its almost exactly the same effort. Some people will need to learn how to drive, or the bus route, or whatever, but thats expected.
Oh hell no it isn’t “once”. I’ve been running Linux machines at home for various purposes for well over a decade and I’m constantly having to learn new shit. Especially because some distros will break things with updates and you’re on your own to figure it out much of the time.
Linux is easier now than it’s ever been but it’s certainly not nearly as user friendly as Windows or Mac. It’s also an intimidating topic to approach with an overwhelming amount of info that the typical the user never needs to think about otherwise (what’s a distro , what DE should I use, how do I install software on my distro, etc). the aggressively unsympathetic community doesn’t help either.
Some of that isn’t the fault of Linux but the truth remains.
Personally have had more issues with the windows installer than any Linux installer I’ve ever used (on multiple different systems)
Yeah, only that piece of shit will silently set up the bootloader on a whole different drive, leaving you a nice surprise once you remove it some time down the line…
I run two different RPM distro machines. Took me less than forty minutes to install on each (my internet is slow), and one of them is an eight-year-old laptop with an i3 and 8 gigs of memory. All runs fine, had issues with the Bluetooth antenna on one (just drivers).
I had to help a family member set up a W11 laptop, took hours (pre-installed) to sift through all the bullshit settings to make it even function without disrupting every session or literally spying on them.
So, I dunno, maybe you pissed off some witch and got cursed, seems like a pretty exceptional experience you had.
I tried to get Nobara working on my pc and couldn’t do it. I have installed soany forms of Debian/ubuntu and arch. I did get bazzite working, but I didn’t like how locked down that os is.
I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how is Bazzite locked down? I have never run any Linux as a primary desktop, though I’m relatively familiar with Linux in general from my years of general nerdiness. I recently installed bazzite on a whim on an old laptop as a first step of potentially shedding Windows (because I like games and bazzite says it’s for gaming). I very limited use it seemed fine, but that’s basically been installing a few things and testing a few games.
Bazzite is an Atomic system. Most of it’s files are immutable, and can only be modified with a system update. That’s great for stability and working from a system exactly as tested, but lots of software needs (or wants) to add extra files to the system. In Bazzite you should basically spin up a VM for that (or a toolbox, those are cool), or “layer” it into the system which reduces the stability you get from the Atomic system.
Both VMs and Layering are extra steps and can be complex depending on what you need, so it’s more difficult to do otherwise routine things if you’re not well versed already.
The other option is to make a build of the system yourself where you add the packages, IIRC i saw someone do it in a github repo and then having automatic builds, though i cannot say personally how easy is to do that and IMO it’s just too much work for just installing packages
Thank you! I appreciate you taking the time to educate me.
Yeah Bazzite is irritatingly restrictive, Fedora or Cachy are honestly worth the little extra effort it takes.
I am all in on Cachy. I have installed it on all of my machines and even my friend’s. Cachy just works so well, I stopped shopping around.
I like Mint and Fedora myself
Same. Ubuntu didn’t run on my tower only Debian did and then I removed the entire OS and downloaded windows 10 from Microsoft and googled up a product key.
Sometimes you can’t escape the dog shit.
I don’t know what you mean by “Nothing” but, I have often failed to have any luck with the automatic partitioning, and I end up doing the partitioning manually. Especially since I almost always separate / and /home onto different physical drives. And doing that, you have to lay out a /boot/efi partition. Without doing that it’ll go through the motions but you won’t get a bootable system.
There are issues with that of course, but for my fedora, Pidoras tools helped identify and fix the compatibility issue
It was probably a compatibility issue. I’m sure if I was more invested I would find a way. I was distro hoping so I wasn’t going to put myself through it. if it had installed it would be a different matter.
except for the embedded license revenues the multitudes keep paying.
Maybe it’s because I neutered my W11 and only dual boot to launch the occasional game or Windows specific driver, but… I haven’t had significant issues with W11? Not that I can remember over the past two years.
No broken updates, no weird copilot things, no excessive background usage, nothing. The only maintenance I do is manually updating graphics drivers.
It wastes none of my time.
The one issue I had was the LG monitor debacle, that tried to install Mcafee, but that was LG’s fault (and I’m never, ever buying an LG display again, as long as I live. I hope you’re happy, LG marketing).
I find this remarkable, because to me it means, Windows doesn’t have to be junk, yet they deliberately configure it that way, and make it extremely difficult to undo. I used a slew of tools neuter it, but I’d have no idea where to start without them.
And to be clear, I use Linux 90% of the time, so I’m not advocating for Windows or anything.
Maybe it’s because I neutered my W11 and only dual boot to launch the occasional game or Windows specific driver
Yes, it’s that. If you’d use it as your daily driver, you would notice. I do tech support at work and there’s hardly a month that goes by without a Win 11 machine sitting on my desk that has - miraculously! - fucked-up drivers or other issues after an “update”.
Windows updates the computer and I swear my ram speed went down.
I have experienced all of that on my work machine. Its a mess of breakage and glitches and background stalls. Group policy initially stopped copilot but now its back again… And its always just enough to mess up your mouse flow
I think a lot of the issues people experience on windows can be mitigated by disabling certain things or as you said “neutering” it. Back when I used windows 10 as my main OS, I did a lot of modification to make it better and it was alright, but windows 11 has also experienced a lot more bugs and criticism just being generally worse. Worse resource management, less user freedom, more tracking, more ai, newer CPU requirements, and that’s all just off the top of my head.
a lot of the issues people experience on windows can be mitigated by disabling certain things or as you said “neutering” it.
Wouldn’t it be great if an operating system just worked properly out-of-the-box?
There are Arch distributions that do that better than Windows 11. What’s Microsoft’s excuse?
Preaching to the choir man. I ditched Windows and am better for it. No excuse for microslop to be this bad.
Any neutering tool recommendations?
Honestly I don’t know which projects are up to date, so I’m afraid to recommend what I vaguely remember.
Search GitHub/Gitlab for “windows debloat” or similar concepts, and sort the results by date updated (e.g. the most recent commit). This is precisely what I’d do with a fresh Windows install, anyway.
On top of that, I go through running services one by one and disable the ones I don’t need.
I disable Defender active protection (except for the firewall/anti tamper) as well, as it absolutely tanks the performance of many applications. As one example I measured, it multiplies the startup time for modded Rimworld, and dramatically slows game ticks. It seems to slow Cyberpunk 2077 as well, but not as reproducibly.
Most “debloaters” won’t do this, as it’s generally not a good idea. But I treat my Windows partition as disposable: nothing sensitive stored, no sensitive data accessible on drives nor networks, data on a separate partition. If it was infected, I could wipe it and reinstall without a care.
AtlasOS
There’s a good one called Ubuntu.
I mean, yeah. Though that’s less recommended these days. I run Debian on proxmox for different server needs. And my laptop is fedora bluefin.
Desktop, as infrequently used as it is, still runs Windows for the few times a year when I absolutely need Windows on bare metal. Plus I keep a Windows 10 VM on the server for the one every month or two that I need it. Try as I might to get away from windows, when you’re part of a team, and the only one running Linux, sometimes you get weird incompatibilities, and you just need to do it on Windows 🤦♂️
I would be careful with any “neutering” tools then, depending on your work, because some can mess with Teams, CoPilot, or whatever else you need. Check the options before you run the tools.
Windows Store apps like Teams work fine for me, though, as do IDEs.
I recently dumped W11 off my wife’s ROG Ally handheld and replaced it with SteamOS. It’s a day and night difference in performance. ASUS is absolutely fucking themselves by shipping it with this vibe-coded trash OS. W11 is total dog shit. The only good thing it does is drive a lot of people into the arms of Linux.
I have an Ally as well and I doubt the night and day difference claims there. Unless something drastic has changed Linux is at best on parity with windows if you change the ACPI settings manually.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/rog-ally-windows-linux/
It’s not a steam deck that was designed around linux.
Maybe I oversold it but I definitely noticed a difference in both performance and battery life. Windows has no profile for handheld devices and assumes they’re a laptop. With SteamOS it seems to have better battery management, with the added bonus of not being spyware vibe-coded garbage. My wife encountered a handful of “yep that’s Windows for you” type issues and now those are reduced to zero.
Always has been
WINDOWS 11 IS GREAT IF YOU DONT VALUE YOUR TIME
Even with that caveat I wouldn’t agree.
But there’s something to it.
For me, a decade of Linux user, having been forced to work with a bunch of Windows laptops recently, even the difference between 10 and 11 was palpable. Not only in resource usage but also in just getting around the system, running updates, trying to disable the stock ticker (?WTF?) etc.
Windows is great! Unless you value privacy…or RAM… or Bandwidth efficiency…or easy networking… or owning your system
Lately I often reminesce on the time SSD has become available. My previous laptop would take 5 minutes to fully open the system, and suddenly BAM! SSD and it was 30 seconds. I remember being blown away. How the fuck did we end up back here. How is it 5+ minutes to start a stupid OS again.
Dunno, my Linux boots that fast.
I remember that too! My crappy old computer. I bought the cheapest SSD they had and it was so much faster.
And I’ve been thinking about the latter too.
BTW I truly hope your Windows takes 5min for a cold boot, and not your Linux, because that would mean there’s something wrong with it or the hardware.
My work laptop is only allowed windows 11 [*] At least I wait for it on company time.
At least I wait for it on company time.
You think I didn’t?
And yes, the story above was about getting them all up to Win11. It’s sad that IT-illiterates see “let’s do what M$ says” as the only option wrt security.
trying to disable the stock ticker (?WTF?)
Geeze I should have invested in “?WTF?🔺” years ago. Look how ?WTF?🔺 is everywhere now! Especially the tech industry. 😭
It really is.
I’ve been a Unix maximalist since I can remember, but I’ve never convinced my peers to follow.
Since windows 11 has dropped, every single one of them now has a Linux machine for one purpose or another. Some are now considering a complete purge of MS products, as I have.
It’s happening.
I’ve experienced something similar. I’ve been telling everyone who will listen how great Linux is for years. It wasn’t until windows 11 that they started listening in big numbers.
Friend!
It’s been a long road, getting from there to here.
It’s glorious, isn’t it?
Only thing I’m having a little trouble getting away from is are some office products and email hosting.
Once Gmail has the equivalent of shared inboxes, I’ll switch to them for my business hosting.
In case people here are not aware, I can create free email address with my domain name for receiving only.
This is great because I don’t really need to send mail for each account I receive mail at, but with Gmail you have to pay for each one as far as I know.
Do you have any experience with Docker? I’ve been running a mail server myself without too much trouble. More than happy to help if you wanted similar.
Yes this is tough.
We use Google Workspace. I use Proton at home.
Since you use Google Workspace, can you think of any reason to not use it over Microsoft for email purposes?
You can set up a catch-all for your domain, didn’t cost extra last time I checked. Granted, it’s been 15 years or so…
Thanks! I guess I could go this route and have rules automatically route emails to those addresses to go to a specific folder.
In case people here are not aware, I can create free email address with my domain name for receiving only.
You should be able in gmail, under the Accounts tab in Settings, to add accounts to “Send mail as”. Not sure how much of your problem that solves, though, if any.
That would actually be better than what I can do with Outlook shared inboxes as that is receiving only. Someone else said, I can send emails as another address, so that might be better.
That works to some extent, although certain receivers like Yahoo will bounce messages because it breaks sender authentication protocols. I had to switch from Gmail to Proton (paid, the free version doesn’t allow it) to fix that.
If you’re sending as a domain with a dkim record allowing gmail to send from it, that shouldn’t be an issue as far as I’m aware.
Maybe there’s some way, but Google didn’t want me to know about it. All their docs made it seem like I would have needed to have an enterprise version (no clue what they call it but you know what I mean) of Google services to get it to work, not the free version. I tried for a couple days anyway and couldn’t solve it, so I figured it was a good opportunity to de-google my email. Once I switched to Proton I had it set up in hardly any time at all, and all the different authentication protocols too. Longest part of the process was simply waiting for record propagation.
It’s a nice circle jerk, but it has way more market share than Linux (at least on desktop, which y’know it’s a desktop OS), so by that measure it is a “success”.
You have to really stretch to some abstract definition of success to call it a failure.
Version 11 didn’t make that market share happen. It inherited that from win XP
Yes, all those XP machines kept upgrading…
No, the actual market share of Windows 11 specifically, even against other Windows OS’s, far surpasses Linux.
People kept using and buying what they already knew, it’s not that hard to understand. Even if the new installment is shit, it’s still familiar, and for many that goes above any other argument.
It’s a market success and a performance failure. Not much of a stretch of any definition.
Kind of a dubious claim, in the context of Windows not having nearly as much market dominance as they used to, and Linux adoption being far higher than it used to. Linux as a platform now has enough of a userbase that even companies like Epic are beginning to take it seriously.
Meanwhile reviews of Windows these days are so nearly universally poor, they are basically coasting on nothing but the inertia of their own previous success - which is eroding.
Capitalist brain.
Have you watched the video before trying to argue against the title?
Yep, been over a year now on Linux, I’ll never go back.
About a year and a half ago I got a laptop to prepare for moving countries. Figured “I’ll probably distro hop a bit see what I like so let’s start pretty plain with Arch”. I’ve uh never distro hopped, Arch my beloved, great daily driver does exactly what I tell it to
My issue with Arch is all the other stuff it installs when installing packages. It is annoying.
the dependencies? all distros have those, unless everything is statically compiled (bad idea) or you could potentially have less of them if you run gentoo and unset a lot of USE flags.
I have to use it for work, and the difference between how my work laptop and my personal laptop (Debian 43) handles basic tasks is stark.
The stuff like “will my headphones work?” has been solved for years at this point. I’m talking even more basic, like rendering the UI and loading menus.
“will my headphones work?”
It was Linux the one you had to check if basic peripherals would work.
Now it is windows the one that gives issues with headphones, the one in charge of the equipment at my office is fed up with all of the complaints related to windows and headphones (the ones provided by the employer and the personal ones).
Last Friday windows decided to stop working with the laptop’s webcam, and it was stuck as in use despite even turning off the camera in setttings.
All our work Teams calls are colleagues swearing because their Bluetooth is messed up, or Windows changed their default audio device (again)
The webcam being stuck on sounds like a Microsoft “feature” that would accompany “We’ve made updates to our EULA” that you’d be forced to accept to start Windows next time. 😬 Lol
You still will run into issues with certain Bluetooth headphones on Linux because they either need proprietary codecs that just aren’t available or fall back to really shitty ones. Not Linux’ fault, but users will only see (or hear) that it doesn’t work properly.
Examples you have noted, sir; for awareness’ sake.
My Jabra ones work but they’re kind of janky.
I’d have to ask, they weren’t mine. But part of the problem was that it’s either high latency and no mic or very low quality both ways, neither very usable for video conferencing. Was fine on Windows. I’m sure their Thinkpad’s shitty Mediatek Bluetooth module didn’t help either.
you know what’s funny, is that my noise cancelling headphones started to have serious problems when I ‘upgraded’ to windows 11. it would pick up the noise cancelling mics and decide they were the primary, not my standalone dedicated microphone.
in the process, it would also downgrade the sound quality for some fucking reason. no matter how many ways I disabled them, it would either re-enable them or I’d find a new way to try.
with Linux? just works.
100%. I’m not quite as ardently anti-Windows as most on this community from a UI/UX standpoint, but both Bluetooth and audio device switching are genuinely terrible experiences in Windows. I find myself pairing audio devices from scratch all the time on my work laptop, and it’s painful every time.
Ehh their UI sucks moving copy and paste from the right click menu to the top of the right click menu as icons sucks.
What is the future like? knowing the slow cadence of debian you must be from the very far future.
I use a focusrite scarlet 2i2 2nd gen audio interface for my microphone. The driver hasn’t been updated for a few years now but even when it was recent, I had issues with my mic quality randomly breaking, making me sound like a robot to my friends. I have had zero issues since switching to linux without even installing any special software for it.
The only thing I kind of miss is that windows allowed me to mix down both mic inputs to a single mono channel whereas on linux both inputs are presented as separate mono channels. I suppose I could fix it with some 3rd party tools but I did not miss it too much so far.
They’re isn’t one positive thing to say about it at all. Not even one.
Uh yeah there is. Which that my games and software run without issue on Windows whereas on Linux I have to constantly fiddle with shit to make it work. But no one’s ever honest about that.
Of course there is. It’s compatible with almost any software and hardware (if you ignore their arbitrary W11 “requirements” which you can in most cases) that you can get your hands on. Microsoft and Windows deserve most of the flack they’re getting, but we should be honest.
Take Linux as a comparison. Compatibility is pretty good nowadays and is only getting better, especially with all the work going into Proton from both Valve and the community. But certain things are simply not supported which can make it either difficult or straight up impossible to get to work. Not that Linux is to blame for that, of course, but it is reality.
if you ignore their arbitrary W11 “requirements” which you can in most cases
No we cannot. I have a perfectly capable gaming machine, which meets my needs perfectly yet it’s not supported by Windows. It’s not some old work laptop a fricking gaming machine.
The depths you have to sink to to get what honestly feels like an attempt at a charity point, but if that wasn’t assumed it wouldn’t have become the product in its position.
If there was an actual push to get compatibility worked out, it very well could. Seems more like a corporate holdback than a technical issue.
Almost any software or hardware? Better to phrase it as almost all desktop software
FYI Windows has a different edition for servers, so that’s why we are not talking about servers since the thread is about the desktop edition
Oh I thought this thread was about the OS, nevermind then…
Well yes, but this whole thread is about Windows 11 which is a desktop OS, so I thought that went without saying.
Oh did you forget server and embedded?
Sure there is: Sometimes it doesn’t boot. And nobody can deny that it’s been great for driving linux adoption!
It’s not Millennium Edition?
That would almost count, if it was significantly different at this point.
There’s one thing Windows does that I miss. The big preview pane in file explorer.
Dolphin seems to have that feature. Menu (the three lines button in the top right) > Show Panels > Information
To be fair Dolphin’s defaults are insane, they seemed to have approached it as ‘how can we allow file/folder navigation but hide as much information as possible’. If you’re a minimalist you might like it, if you want to use a file manager to manage files I can’t really see how the defaults are useful.
I remember finding this out a while back. I tried to install it, but had some problem I don’t recall. I’ll try again. Thanks.
EDIT: Ah, right. It doesn’t find my mounted drives nor my shared drives from my server. Nor does it show previews of any filetype but images (which IS nice), just a big icon for text files, for instance.
I suppose there are fixes for these things, but I didn’t find anything in configuration or in the help section of the website after a quick search. That’s as far as I’m willing to dive into this, because I know I could spend hours on this, and still not find a solution from past experience.
Thanks, anyway.
Dolphin is plugin based. So there’s plugins for adding previews for more file formats. For network share stuff you may want to check if “kio” is installed and any optional dependencies on your distro for more functionality
Mounted drives
They should show up in the bottom of the Places pane on the left, in the “Devices” section. If it literally cannot find them, then I can’t say anything about what is wrong.
Shared drive
You should be able to add a network folder in Places (the left pane) > Network > Add Network Folder (in the top menu). If that wizard doesn’t work, you should be able to do it manually by typing
sftp://[email protected]or whatever into the URI bar and press enter.Enable text preview
Menu (the three lines button in the top right) > Configure Dolphin > Interface > Previews > Text Files
Why would people running Linux even care about the success/failure of Windows 11?
Because the worse windows 11 gets and the more people move off of it, the more corporations will be forced to support it with their products. Meaning we won’t have to rely on hacky bullshit to get them to work.
I have a ‘helper’ PC that monitors and downloads and catalogues. I wanted to go to Linux, but after battling with network share access for days I just gave up. Linux needs to be more ‘works out of the box’ but I’m patient.
I’m still primarily on windows myself, about 80% of the way to pulling the trigger on switching to Linux as my main driver, but I haven’t been able to work out all the things I need to be able to do yet, and dual booting really isn’t that viable for me because the amount of shit I typically have going at once means rebooting isn’t a trivial process. I’ve found a lot of shit on Linux to actually be pretty simple to accomplish once you know where to look for information, but finding that information can be tricky and that’s what makes the process so frustrating. That said my windows system is starting to have enough problems just running stably that it might force the issue before long.
Windows 11? I haven’t had a serious issue in years.
- I’m not putting 11 on anything of mine after dealing with it at work and on the laptop I ended up switching to Bazzite. It’s atrocious.
Have fun with that. What was the issue at work?
I actually have to ask: what is something that 'works out of the box '?
Let’s put it this way. To map a network drive in windows: go to PC, select drive and advanced sharing, add user. Then click network, click PC, right click drive and map drive.
Now do that in Linux.
