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- cross-posted to:
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Seeing the windows 3.1 interface took me back to a much happier time.
I definitely wasn’t happier with my computer back then.
Only now?
My Windows computer stopped felling mine when 10 came aroundM$ is terminal and most of the world is hooked up to a terminal entity; Most of the world is terminal.
Sounds like a personal problem. Windows works great for me.
You pay how much to be told no?
Are there different versions of Windows 11? Mine doesn’t show ads at all.
Same
I’m curious about this. Do either of you run a custom dns for blocking ads, like adguard or pihole?
Did you turn off a bunch of stuff when you first got the PC?
Do you have corporate policies being applied in your registry?
I have Win 11 Pro. I had Starfield ads on my lock screen for a while. I also had those search recommendations, but that’s it. Now I have nothing. Maybe it’s related to EU?
Yeah, you all get all the nice things we don’t in the US.
Massgrave.dev can help you get an LTSC version of windows that have no ads
Is BeOS still floating around?
No but here is a open source branch of it called haiku and it works great!
@ChickenLadyLovesLife @dvdnet62 Not as such. I mean it is but its drivers are 25 years out of date now. YellowTab Zeta is out there too which was updated a bit but is still ancient.
But there is Haiku. Bigger, slower, more complicated, but it does a lot more.
As I recall, Gasse was offered something like $440 million for BeOS by Apple and he turned them down. Not sure it would have made any difference in anything by this point, but at least Objective-C wouldn’t have been littered with classes with the “NS” prefix.
@ChickenLadyLovesLife I was a big fan of BeOS. I reviewed it about quarter of a century ago:
… and I liked it a lot:
Yeah, BeOS was awesome. I remember a coworker showing it to me in 1996 - he also taught me how to wow the c-suite with giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases, a parlor trick that has served me well over the years.
I am sorry but I don’t junderstand any of this.
> the c-suite
(?)
> with giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases
(?)
> a parlor trick
(?) How is a database a trick?
What does this stuff mean?
it never been
Windows 9x was low-bullshit.
NT and 2000 were corporate enough to be no-nonsense. They belonged to the administrator, but the administrator can be you.
ME was a mistake.
XP was not yet online enough to be properly skeezy.
But from Vista onward, yeah, it’s been an escalating shit-show that’s difficult to miss.
Vista sucked for sure, but Windows 7 was pretty great IMO. I was dragged kicking and screaming into the shit that’s Windows 10 because Steam stopped supporting 7.
I would still be using 7 if ransomware wasn’t a thing.
I went back to Mint instead.
Win2k is peak windows
Always has(n’t) been.
That’s not true at all.
I disagree.
- XP felt like it was mine.
- 7 felt like it was mine
- 8 felt like they were trying to force something on me.
- 10 felt like they were pushing bloatware like a cell phone. At least l could remove some of that?
- 11 feels like they decided it’s their computer, I’m just renting time in it by watching ads. You could remove half the programs by default and I would not miss any of them. Do I need a version of minesweeper with micro transactions? No!
XP wasn’t yours when MS pushed an update without permission or announcement.
And you were free to turn that off.
I imagine, you guys might be measuring with two different scales. Early Windows versions were fine, but even back then, a switch to Linux would give you so much more customizability to actually make it yours.
This is a dumb anecdote, but I switched to Linux from Windows 8, and pretty much the first thing I did, was to figure out how to hide the window titlebars. Mostly because I realized, I could, but they also just took screen space away on my laptop.
Windows 2000 was the last Windows that I felt I could just slap on any old hardware.
Which is weird, since Win2k definitely had lower hardware compatibility than XP, Vista, 7, etc.
It wasn’t consumer-focused and just didn’t have the driver compatibility from vendors yet.
Quite the contrary, it had exemplary compatibility, including Plug’n’Play and wide native USB support.
With the things you tried it did.
Believe me, I was part of a team testing compatibility.
I’m sorry, there’s microtransactions in minesweeper?
What the actual fuck
What?
And unskippable ads in solitaire
This is an OS (most people) pay for
I’m sorry what??? I switched from 10 to Linux becouse of how bad 11 was, but that sounds ridiculous even for Microsoft
Oh, it’s now tied into Xbox Live so you need an Xbox account, get achievements, collectibles, challenges and making it ad free requires a subscription of €1.99 per month. Not shitting you.
- 7 felt like it was mine
I remember that marketing campaign. Windows Vista had a shaky launch, because the hardware manufacturers hadn’t polished the Vista-compatible drivers yet. 6 months later, they had caught up, but people still had a bad taste from it.
So when service pack 1 came out, Microsoft made a reskinned version of it and started an ad campaign with “customers” claiming “Windows 7 was my idea!” and the public ate it up.
As I remember Vista had some areas that were hard or unintuitive to configure, Win7 cleaned up those parts.
Win7 also made the disk hungry background processes play nice, Vista would occasionally lock up with 100% CPU and disk usage while the os scanned something.
And I agree Win7 is just a reskinned Vista.
I remember my vista experience was excessive amounts of prompts to confirm it was using some privileged access for literally anything I tried to do.
And a shortcut to open Microsoft® LinkedIn® at OS level, and what surprises me the most is that uses your default browser instead of always opening it in Edge.
That’s a perfect way to put it. I remember starting college and being really excited about the cloud, having my stuff accessible anywhere, changes automatically saved, etc etc. but now I don’t want any of my shit anywhere near their servers, it’s mine and mine alone and I’ll manage it myself and buffer against losses the best I can. I’d rather have myself fuck up and break a hard drive rather than let microsoft or apple wipe my stuff over a bug or because I didn’t pay them enough. Horrible, misleading bullshit.
I think you’d like syncthing
this.
Never has been with windows on it.
The irony
The thing that makes me laugh/cry/be happy I switched to Linux, is that it’s in that state, but it’s a paid product.
If the license was free it was somewhat okay, but it’s not. People are still paying.
I can’t even remove the “Recommended” section from the Start menu
That’s disgusting
i mean it’s annoying but how is it disgusting?
it just shows recently opened files/software mixed in with stuff you open frequently, it’s not an ad section or anything.
but yeah i have disabled it on all my machines, because I’m not using it + disabling it adds two extra rows of pinned apps…It’s called hyperbole
EU should force a choice for all new PC. What OS do you want to run? Windows, Linux or Android? Then you would be able to see real competition in the OS market.
Maybe something like the raspberry pi OS chooser. In the best of worlds you have everything installed and just choose in the boot menu what to run.
Some manufacturers allow you to get a refund for pre installed windows if you feel like sitting on the phone for hours. Something about a lawsuit involving Microsoft and anticompetitive contracts with the manufacturer not allowing the distribution of other operating systems.
I’ve seen a story about someone who got a refund for their dell laptop but it was slow, and the support staff was rude about it during the process. They stated things like the Microsoft software is free and why would you want to remove windows anyway, passing him from department to department. It’s often $60-$80 depending on the version of windows etc.
Edit: I should clarify it might only be a US thing, I’ve heard people in France having some luck.
i mean you can just buy a Dell laptop with a copy of Ubuntu preloaded instead, they sell those as an option with most models
It’s always better to go that route. I also understand having hardware requirements and not being able to find a version of those models with Linux installed.
I like what system 76 is doing but I don’t think they really have competition in the US market right now. If you don’t mind a clevo and you live in the US I’d recommend them.
Windows 10 LTSC FTW!!! I just installed it and wow is it snappier and devoid of nearly all of those annoyances. I have no idea if productivity apps are affected by its stripped down nature but for Steam gaming it’s perfect. I get less lag spikes on steamVR.
I haven’t trusted Windows in years. This is just for gaming. I have a physically separate hot swappable Optane SSDs for Linux and Windows Gaming.
For those who will winge at me for not just switching to Linux. During this process I gave a concerted effort to give Linux a go and chose Manjaro KDE to try for steamVR gaming. It sucked. Once I had worked out that it was a permissions issue (It’s always a fucking permissions issue under Linux) and just ran it under the root account, there was extremely high latency for the VR compositor to HMD display. Completely unusable as it made me sick and that’s usually very hard. I tried X11 and Wayland. Direct and Non Direct output modes. No success.
I was using Manjaro KDE and ended up switching to Pop OS because Manjaro would never work right with my GPU. Pop OS has worked very well out of the box though.
I chose Manjaro KDE as one of the SteamVR requirements is KDE Plasma. It’s required because it has a DRM function to allow SteamVR to take ownership of the DisplayPort.
A quick google search says that PopOS is Gnome based. But KDE can be installed over it? I might give it a go.
Odd. I retired from arch to Manjaro. I’m baffled at the depiction of it being difficult. It’s been a smooth 6 years so far…and yes, Nvidia.
I’m using StartAllBack (paid software), it replace the start menu with a Windows 7 like one, and brings back the pre Windows 11 taskbar, it has no ads and good customization. There’s also Open Shell that is free and Start11 that’s also paid.
I love openshell, so many options !
Definitely switch search from tab to just the windows key however
I think it’s a registry modification, but, I’ve seen windows start to ignore modifications to the registry so idk.
I helped my parents migrate to linux mint and they are very happy with the transition. No more ads, dumb bing search suggestions, or MS edge.
My parents have been asking me to do this for multiple years at this point, I need to make sure I do it next time I visit (they’re on win 10 though so it could be worse at least)
