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
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.
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 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.
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”.
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.
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?
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 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