I know some users held back on the upgrade while Windows 10 still had support, but there's many improvements to privacy & consent in Windows 7 that are worth considering, now that both are about to be equally out of their support window.
It's one of the last versions where the modal dialogs ask "Yes" or "No", instead of "Yes" and "Not now", "Maybe later", or "Ask again tomorrow".
I ran Linux for many years. But I needed to run some software that only supported windows and mac, and wine didn't cut it, so I had to reinstall windows.
I can't tolerate windows. I put up with 10 for a while then went back to 7. 7 was good. Then some stuff wasn't supported so I moved to 11. Couldn't do it. I'd get random garbage like a notification for some "grand prize giveaway". I legit thought I'd gotten adware installed somehow. Nope, official Microsoft notification! Want to configure the system at all? Keep defender from trashing your CPU for fifteen minutes after you compile something? Stop auto-restarts that close everything? Use actual sleep not the weird "connected sleep" nonsense? Tough, you don't get to. If you do it anyway it will revert after your next update (mandatory btw!) or sometimes just at random.
I can't remember a version since 7 that doesn't make me feel like I'm in a bazaar being accosted by freaking rug merchants.
I used to hate macs. I switched to a macbook. I am much happier now despite the occasional annoyances.
I don't want to motivate anyone to switch back to Windows (because Microsoft), but for anyone who doesn't want to or can't switch, but also doesn't want to endure Microsoft's chosen way of entirely ignoring user needs but instead focusing on squeezing money out of them through ads and the collection of user data in Windows 10 and 11, check out the Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC version! It's still supported 'til 2031 iirc. Plus, as it's meant to Enterprises and IoT systems, it's stripped from all the ads, bloatware, and what not. When I installed it first one year ago, I was just sad that I didn't know it earlier. It's everything I ever wanted Windows to be: lean, fast, and (somewhat) minimalistic, at least compared to stock Windows 10.
Can't 100% say whether Windows 11 IoT LTSC is equally good, but from what I've read it also is worth considering.
> after you install Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation, you won't be able to use the recovery partition on your PC to go back to your previous version of Windows.
> after you install Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation, you won't be able to use the recovery partition on your PC to go back to your previous version of Windows.
I was already sold; you don't have to convince me.
The fact that this is even brought up as a solution really speaks to how bad Windows is.
i was going to say something similar. the fact that a version of windows that is designed for IoT devises is still usable as a desktop is absolutely ridiculous. imagine using OpenWRT as a desktop...
It's not designed for IoT devices per se, the naming is just terrible. A comparison to OpenWrt is not warranted here, although to reiterate, the naming is terrible.
In a way, it is for "IoT" devices...but enterprisey things. Where I work we have it on a few devices that I guess you could call an "IoT" device. Unattended driver kiosks for truck scales, manufacturing equipment that requires windows, industrial control panels, etc.
That's what it is for. A lot of this stuff uses really old software, some of which the vendor doesn't even exist anymore, and it only runs on Windows so these control panels and devices need windows (unless you manage to get some of it working on wine but that's usually not viable in these cases).
So yeah, it's supposed to be a full desktop, because these devices often require it to some extent, albeit a little slimmed down and LTS.
I think HN would be surprised to learn just how many devices run windows out there in the world outside of silicon valley. Windows is everywhere you'd hope never to see it running at.
well, i am not surprised that anything with a GUI would run some form of windows, even ATMs. i would not have categorized them as IoT devices though, but fair point.
The recovery partition has some value. But in an OS reinstall scenario Windows.old is a much more helpful feature.
However, these features won't used by someone installing Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation (Evaluation just means that it's 90 day free trial version). This is because to aquire the non-trial version of the OS you must either be willing to license Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC from Microsoft, or crack the activation. If you crack Windows you do not need the 90 day free trial! And any company which has institutional knowledge of what an LTSC edition is, is capable of running the 90 day trial in a non destructive way (pro tip: put your new OS on a new drive and keep your old drive in a drawer).
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is the best version of Windows 11 I have ever tried, no contest.
My theory is that Microsoft offers LTSC IoT in part as a bone to throw the vocal complainants (read: people who use HN) - and that the terrible name is to dissuade standard users.
I just reinstalled my own system with a combination of LTSC and Linux (currently looking at a riced Hyprland on CachyOS) with the understanding that there will be occasional annoyances (but still less so than consumer W11)
Pro isn't ad-free by default. With appropriate regedits/privacy scripts/tools you can make it ad-free until an update inevitably reverts/"upgrades" some part of it. It's not hard to maintain it in this state but you are fighting against what microsoft wants the OS to be when you do this.
I've never had a Windows update revert anything like that. I turned this stuff off 3 years ago and haven't had to do anything since. I think this is just FUD that people earnestly believe and repeat because it sounds like something they think Microsoft would do.
Hear me out: MS Excel. The one true powerful version only exists on Windows. Another anchor: ODBC drivers. Some good SQL Server connectivity options are only available on Windows.
When your captive audience is accountants, traders, and CFOs, it's quite a moat.
And then, somehow, the desktop Outlook is better on mac than on Windows.
On Windows I can't even easily copy/paste from one email to another. It strips out half the formatting and any colors that were there. Nor can I copy email recipients from an email into a new one.
I tried switching to Windows last year and I just couldn't do it. So now my expensive and fancy powerful laptop collects dust and I'm back to my 5 year old m1 (which is somehow faster, usually).
my favprite notfavorite win11 feature is that they broke keyboard layout switching, permanently. It has been reported as an unsolved bug for nearly two years now :-/. in 25+ years, I had been taking it for granted to work correctly. Apparently nobody in Redmond uses the feature..
I am european, and (try to) use it minutes apart.
As an extra bonus, MS Teams regularly either ignores keyboard switch, or switches 50% broken, half the keys. But what can you expect, from an app which is a selfupdating web server that installs itself with squirrel :-/
I switched my spare PC from Linux back to Win10, and it's way less annoying than I remember (rug bazaar was right). Maybe because it's not getting constant updates anymore.
Only issue is that Windows will periodically re-bloat itself - so you have to re-run it after more or less every quarterly windows update.
The only thing remaining that I want to remove but cannot get rid of is edge. Removing edge is only available in the EU for $ome in$ane rea$on. You might be able to get an EU ISO for installation? Unclear to me but I haven’t dug too deeply.
Imagine any other thing treating you like this. Once a week, your IKEA cupboard locks itself and repairs some factory defects. You want something? Tough. Once every half an hour, it opens a random hatch and drops a ton of paper on the floor, full of IKEA ads. It has all kinds of cameras to see if it can sell you other IKEA stuff, but pinky promise, they don't sell images to others, except 700 partners. And every company in the world is petrified of fear about using other cupboards. But good news, here is some stuff a friend of a friend gave you, that stops all this. Mostly. For a month.
I was willing to give Edge a chance years ago. I didn’t see a compelling enough reason to switch, so I stuck with Firefox. However, while troubleshooting some problems on a family member’s PC I got to see what a ‘default’/‘opt in to everything’ Edge experience is like in 2025.
It’s horrifying. Edge is jam-packed with bloat and the entire browser is geared towards monitoring and hoarding every scrap of user interaction that passes through it. The worst part is that the average person likely has no idea just how pervasive Microsoft’s spying and ad-targeting is.
I envy the fact that EU Citizens have the right to decline all of these intrusive “features” foisted upon them by Microsoft. I doubt Congress would ever come close to affording us a fraction of these same consumer rights. Sigh.
Just a data point on the "modern suspend" feature. I have a Win11/Fedora dual boot laptop. Fedora doesn't do modern suspend, at least on that machine. Found that deep, deep down in the "BIOS" (yes, I know, UEFI) menus - so deep that you have to do a secret keyboard dance to even get that menu - is a "enable S3 sleep" option. Figured OK, I'll just get good suspend in Linux and whatever in Windows.
Surprise! Windows 11 likes S3 suspend just fine. Push the button, instant screen off and winking power light... push it again, instant wakeup. So if by some miracle your hardware/UEFI still supports it, you're good. This is a 5-year-old-ish Acer Swift 3 for what it's worth.
Oh, wait, you mean Windows update toggles that setting back? Whoa.
The forced reinstalls for updates is the worst. Sometimes when working on some Excel file etc at night, I went away without saving (e.g. crying kid needs attention, and I never returned). Auto-saving only works when you store files in OneDrive. So then windows Update will shut down Excel, and Excel often won't create an AutoSave, and then hours of work are lost -- totally intentionally, deliberately, all using Microsoft products that are apparently specifically designed to make you lose hours of work.
What is an operating system? At it's core, an OS is a program to run other programs. Yet this Windows program likes to randomly kill all the programs it's supposed to keep running, at night, when it thinks you aren't looking. It literally fails at the most basic purpose of an operating system.
If they didn't force restart then the patches they release for vulnerabilities would never take effect. What normal user restarts their PC other than when they're having issues?
> You know that other operating systems can manage without that, right?
Not for kernel updates (Linux, by default), and not for macOS which is now RO root fs and also requires a reboot because updates are image based, a. la. Fedora Silverblue.
Also FWIW, Windows now has hotpatching, albeit not available to consumers, it's attached to enterprise licensing
You can update the Linux kernel without killing userspace. Granted it's not without reboot though. Just hibernate/suspend to disk and choose a different kernel on startup, it will still load the RAM image just fine; every program will be still running.
Designed to force you to buy a OneDrive subscription? I bet relevant revenue numbers went slightly but noticeably up when this was introduced. Sweet promotion package stuff!
In the early days of Windows 10, it was even worse because the updates could brick your windows install and you would get stuck on a blue screen or a boot loop after it forced you to restart. I've had to reinstall W10 at least a dozen time because of bad updates.
I personally liked the W8 approach to updates. You were allowed to set windows update in a mode that would notify you of new updates but you got to chose when to download/install them. That setting as also permanent and they didn't "accidentally" revert it back during an update.
This has happened with every version of Windows. NT4 SP6 was a nightmare and recommended to skip because it would cause a BSOD. Microsoft had to release SP6a about a month later.
Updates and unbootable systems are nothing new, to treat any OS as a unicorn in this respect is ignoring past history. Happens with Windows, macOS, and Linux.
>It's one of the last versions where the modal dialogs ask "Yes" or "No", instead of "Yes" and "Not now", "Maybe later", or "Ask again tomorrow".
This difference captures so much...
I recently setup a minecraft server on an old windows machine and had a hard time setting it to never restart automatically. After reading some support forums I found the menu to control when it restarts but still didnt see an option to completely stop it.
Eventually I found a way that I can't even recall at this point.
So much easier to run mc servers on Linux boxes. You just grab the jvm that version wants and throw everything into a folder and use the jvms java executable on the server.jar.
Of course, the OS doesn't really matter it's just easier to manage a Linux box as opposed to a windows machine half the time. Especially for a server. Theres a lot of stupid shit you'll see on consumer and even enterprise versions of Windows which I've had to unfortunately deal with for a decade in exchange for money. Since the gp mentioned how frustrating it was I can relate.
Edit: also ufw is so much easier than the windows firewall. That shit drives me insane.
Was gonna say the exact same thing. Getting Java installed is always a bit of a headache but that's really the only hard part. Once your JVM is good, everything from there is easy.
And even the JVM part, it's not HARD, just annoying.
I wouldn't recommend doing it for mc. They keep changing and or using old jvms. What I do is I just go on oracles site and get the jdk they list that works, and run it directly from the folder. Also some distros do make it a pain lol.
I haven't done this in forever, but last time the recommended OpenJDK answer was somehow not right. Got the Oracle one, had to figure out where you extract the tarball to, fix my
PATH, yada yada.
That sounds fine though. The PATH variable is a nicety for the user to not need to type long paths, really like using ~ for the home directory, not for program setup.
Even on Windows it can be a hassle because so many links will send you to Java 8 which Minecraft won't run on. Even the official links on minecraft.net sent you to the version that wouldn't run Minecraft for some time.
I'm not sure if you've tried it or not, but sdkman.io is a really handy JVM ecosystem environment manager that makes getting Java (and other JVM langs) really easy to install and switch between.
Makes me think of notices around adult clubs I've seen such as:
"CONSENT: A clear and unambiguous agreement, expressed outwardly through mutually understandable words or actions, to engage in a particular activity. Consent can be withdrawn by either party at any point."
and
"No means No"
What I'm about to say is strongly worded and I understand not a _perfect_ analogy by any means. However, it does sum up my feelings on this issue.
If Person A makes repeated unwanted advances towards Person B, we have words to describe that. But if Person A, a company, makes repeated unwanted advances towards Person B we call that business.
I wish Microsoft would have never changed the business model of Windows away from paid upgrades.
Now they have no incentive to make good upgrades. Instead, they are only incentivized to add privacy-compromising services that nobody wants or asked for.
Nice window you have there, would be a shame if somebody threw a upgrade into it.. should pay insurrance and protection money, so we could save things from "pimprovements"
While both OSes are no longer supported, important software like Chrome still run on Windows 10 and will continue to do so for a while. Staying on Windows 7 means losing security updates, and very soon, not being able to load websites that use the latest web features.
Stop selling Windows 7 so much.. As a 40-year veteran of tech, "latest web features" are usually a red flag for me more than anything.. More spying, more PII selling, more addiction attempts, etc..
Oh my god i HATE the lack of a “no” option! I’ve been meaning to go find a guide for editing registry to disable the windows 11 upgrade requests, but now I worry that might not exist?
And of course the really important one where only Enterprise is allowed to fully disable Telemetry: https://admx.cengizyilmaz.net/policy/allow-diagnostic-data “Diagnostic data off (not recommended). Using this value, no diagnostic data is sent from the device. This value is only supported on Enterprise, Education, and Server editions.”
Well, you can remove the Windows spotlight stuff from the lock screen through the regular settings. Change it from Windows Spotlight to picture or whatever, and remove "Weather and more" from the "show detailed status". I'd say the ability to disable that through Group Policy stretches the definition of "important feature"
I'm not sure I'd agree those policies are enough to truly argue Windows 7 was a last version to not separate out important features to Enterprise -- I'd actually instead simply make the larger point that before Windows 10, Windows wasn't a chintzy ad-driven whorehouse.
Windows 7 is still dramatically less secure by design (i.e. not missing patches but architectural changes) compared to Windows 10, even Windows 8 had some meaningful kernel security features that 7 lacks. This includes sandboxing measures that Chrome & Firefox use, meaning you're still less secure even if you're not downloading shady software.
You're frankly better off applying a bunch of registry changes to 10, using a Education or N (EU) edition "illegally", or blocking DNS than going back to 7 just for privacy concerns. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Meh... technically, you're probably right. In practice, it probably won't make a damn bit of difference. It's just like how everybody was scared to run without anti-virus years ago. More people got their computers fucked up by AV than by actual viruses. Still to this day Defender is there fucking up your computer and really not doing a great job protecting you from anything. Ransomware is still running amok despite everything being "up to date" and running AV, and 30 different corporate security defense suites.
If "support" doesn't allow opting out of their actively user-hostile decision making, I seriously question the value of "support" at all. In many ways I'd rather my computer go to some Russian botnet than trust an American corporation with my data—at least the former has a chance of getting shut down.
I recently bought a laptop and that came with Windows 11.
After hours of trying to work around the OOB "experience" that really really wants to you to sign up for a Microsoft account I finally managed to circumvent it.
After using it for a while I actually like it. It's smooth and no major glitches.
Then I didn't use my laptop for a while, logged in and was greeted with
"Let's finish setting up your account". Only options are "Remind me again x days later" and "Ok"
This is so obnoxious behavior it really makes me want to just roll over the whole machine with Linux.
I wish the clowns from the marketing department hadn't taken over the Windows product division.
My laptop is already setup thank you very much. I don't need your condesdencing dark pattern UX BS in my face.
I use a few utilities to tame Windows 11 and make it work more like Windows 7, 8, and 10. It should get rid of that "Remind me again" thing, I haven't seen it in a long, long time. No ads, no crap from Microsoft.
I have an old laptop that boots Windows 7 and in my opinion, it's peak Windows (having used everything from 98SE onward, including 2K). It feels modern in a way that older entries don't but doesn't have the annoying and user-hostile elements of newer entries. The visual style is slightly dated feeling but it wouldn't take a whole lot of work to fix that.
I think it was windows 8 or 10 that introduced the new menus which I found somehow both too simplistic and harder to navigate. And then sometimes you get lucky and figure out a way to open the old menus to do what you actually want.
Yeah it still uses the old Control Panel system, which is far from perfect (it's really bad about "dialog tunnels" where some things are buried too many levels deep), but overall is more servicable for technical users.
Another thing that it has over XP is that it's better at providing a minimally usable environment post-install, with a better payload of default drivers. I don't miss booting into 256 color 640x480 and trying to get all the hardware in a functional state without a network connection like was a frequent occurrence with XP and older.
The new menus are really fun in 11, where it starts out new, and then when you want more info pretty much everything changes back (font/kerning/color) to the point of feeling you need to do a doubletake. Its something that if it happened online you'd swear you've been slip-streamed and shouldn't continue. Guess they dont have anyone who can move over the old items to the new look, go figure.
The old dialogs used to be extensible, in that getting random software like mouse drivers to just add a new tab to the mouse control panel was the way to do things. The new one is, as far as I know, not that. So there's a chance that they left random bits alone because they're afraid to break things.
Or that's merely the justification to push back against the designers…
I always try to reach to arrive at the old configuration before I even consider looking at the text, the newer version just wastes my time and the setting is never there or labelled wrong.
Respectfully disagree. NT/Win2000 was the peak as it was before they added all the DRM/phone home junk. It ran fast, in fact diablo ran smoother on it than on the win 98 partition I had at the time. Granted some programs failed because they were doing things memory wise they should not been doing...
2K was amazing compared to 98, but 7 has a number of QoL and tech improvments that I'd have a hard time giving up, and it's easier to make 7 better behaved than to bring 2K into the modern era.
Give KDE Plasma a shot! You can even try it in QEMU with virgl for graphics acceleration without risking anything more than an hour or two of time setting it up.
Also I use a lot of audio softwares and it's hard to run them on Linux, I would need to try how much those download managers (another rant worthy subject) and Windows VSTs can really run on Linux. But when I get a new PC I will.
I mean, virtualizing with good hardware acceleration and integration can kind of be the best of both worlds, right? You're not replacing macOS, you're supplementing it with FOSS software that you _may_ find more tolerable, and if not, just use the same software and workflow that you have been.
I hated how much 7 bloated the base installation size (10x or more) versus late versions of XP, but otherwise, yeah, it's by far the best desktop OS they've made.
(EDIT: Actually maybe it was Vista that introduced the inexplicable massive installation size bloat? My memory is fuzzy there)
Yeah that's not bad looking at all. What happened to UI styling and the theming engine in 8 was a travesty. It was so ugly and because the theming engine had been gutted, the user couldn't even fix it with third party visual styles.
That's maybe 11's single saving grace: it course corrected and Fluent actually looks pretty good. If only the rest weren't awful.
Windows 11 is inoffensive where Windows 8 was ugly. But Windows 8's visual style was more functional. Windows had borders. Menus and dialogs had contrast and shadows. The focused window was obvious.
The Vista/7 era of visual styles had so many good entries. You could throw a dart at the VSStyles DeviantArt page blindfolded and hit something nice looking. Frankly it still severely outclasses the Linux theming scene.
W8 and W8.1 are atrocious out of the box but you can customize them to make it even better than W7. Swapping the start menu for something good and customizable like Stardock Start8 will completely change the experience and remove 95% of the problem people have with that OS.
I kinda mentioned it in another comment but I don't think I could make 8/8.1 work no matter how good it is unless the awful theme engine could be replaced wholesale with that of 7. It's just so hideous.
I still have Windows7 on my fathers computer and it's more than enough for him (Firefox + FreeCell). We are behind NAT and he doesn't open anything except for a couple of pages + has uBlock.
The whole hype around Win10 loosing support is way overblown…
Worth noting that "behind NAT" is not a security measure. Technologies exist that circumvent NAT to various degrees (and that's usually without malicious intent!). WebRTC is a famously annoying example of this where it's got tons of legitimate applications but has also been responsible for serious security issues, especially in earlier implementations.
The same set of tools exist with different names to punch the same sorts of holes automatically in ipv6 firewalls, so are ipv6 firewalls also not security measures?
I am a blue collar layperson (who only understands IPv4's limitation as a lack of total available IP addresses) that disables IPv6 (at the router level) for this exact reason — I feel like I am losing the little bit of control that being "behind NAT" allows on a private IP range/network (e.g. firewall; port mapping).
Obviously I still use Windows 7 Pro 64-bit as my only Microsoft computer — also have an Ubuntu dual Xeon (for LLM/crypto) and several Apple Silicon products (for general browsing).
You're misunderstanding the purpose of NAT, which is not a security boundary. Apple, for instance, has (or had) nearly all of their workstations on a public IP space.
You can still equally as effectively firewall and port map devices on public IPs as you can behind NAT -- and actually just a bit easier, since you're taking NAT out of the picture.
Do you have a gateway that doesn't do ipv6 firewalling (e.g. allow outgoing, only allow established incoming)? I was under the impression that even no-names manage to get that correct. Why would you need port mapping if not for NAT? Even with NAT, for home use I was always mapping port n to n.
Maybe I am using some (use mostly firefox at home on my Linux box, other than when streaming certain sites where the picture is better on chrome) - but I can't think of many "new" FFox features I actually like, going back to like version 68 or something.. Every time they introduce something new, I have to disable it or work around it, or whatever.. Just let me keep my "it works" workflow, FFS.
I've had my dad, with similar usage patterns, using XFCE for close to 15 years now. Very few problems with it, I only have to play tech support maybe once a year. Worth considering..
The third option is to install some Linux like Ubuntu or Linux Mint on it.
It is nowadays actually easier to install Ubuntu Linux than a Windows. Just be sure to back up your data to an external hard drive, and restore it from there after the install.
I think it's great that Microsoft are still job-creators after all these years. Just think of all the extra cyber-security jobs they creating by making windows 11 adware and AI infested garbage!
> After that date, users are encouraged to enroll their devices in the Extended Security Updates program for free, which will grant them twelve more months of security updates and plenty of time to plan an upgrade to something supported.
Windows 7 was the last good Microsoft OS. After Windows 7, I switched to Linux, and the last Windows 7 machine was turned off early this year. I'm surprised there isn't a corporate push for "Windows 7 Forever".
How many trashed Windows 10 PC's are home desktops or laptops used without a password in the first place? But grandma's PC needs secure boot against Tom Clancy level threat actors, it's for her own good.
I recently added Windows 7 support to an open source app I run, Kindle Comic Converter.
It was as easy as downgrading a bunch of dependencies (PySide6, numpy) and created a legacy build, and the Windows 7 version got like 2% of downloads (~200). I assume it works since I've gotten no complaints and I don't have a Windows 7 machine to test haha, Windows 7 in UTM crashes a lot for me on macOS ARM.
Man people are still using this. I really only did this since I added macOS 10.14 support (prior minimum was macOS 12) and most of the work needed was already mostly done by that. In theory I could even get macOS 10.10 support, but that would require downgrading Qt6 to Qt5
"Statcounter Stats Go Wonky This Month" wouldn't have made enough clicks, I suppose. Even the wording of the 2nd paragraph misses the point - this is obviously not statistical fluctuation. They didn't even bother to look into the more granular data either.
Maybe the number of Windows 7 users has not changed, but those using Windows 10 and 11 are flocking to Linux. That'd be a net positive change in the Windows 7 percentage. :p
I just can't understand why Microsoft can just remove all this shit from windows 11. Guys we don't want adds, one drive and all that crap I know you make money on it but let people come to it naturally when it's forced it turns us a way. I keep hearing stories of entire medical offices, small businesses going mac/linux for the sake of not being forced to candy crush it up.
Windows Enterprise/LTSC/IoT (effectively all names for the same thing) are the product offerings delivering what you want. When I need Windows, it’s what I use.
It’s available for $238 from CDW.com or less from resellers.
If you want to play games, you have to do a tiny bit of extra work to get the right frameworks/drivers installed, especially for VR. But this isn’t done to frustrate you, it’s because this version of windows doesn’t come with anything that’s strictly helpful, and Activity Monitor shows a blissfully low number of processes running on first boot. If you want bells and whistles, you’re free to add them yourself.
Note that you're likely paying $238 and still not getting a legit copy of Windows. If you don't have a volume license agreement and a minimum of 5 Windows licenses, you aren't supposed to use the LTSC version of Windows, and they're not supposed to be used for primary desktops. Also you're supposed to have a Pro license for the machine BEFORE you buy LTSC, so that's just more extra costs. You might as well just save the money and pirate it. Not that this will make any difference in practice if you're just using it at home, but still, people should probably know this.
There's the obvious telemetry, MS account requirement for home editions, and other MS dark patterns for one.
But, Windows 11 performance is still crap compared to 10, and even 7. The right click menu in explorer is still high latency, and if you have a lot of extensions, you see "loading..." and it can take a good full second for all menu options to show up. Also, you still can't move the task bar, search is as garbage as ever (but honestly that's expected from Windows at this point).
Windows 11 does have some nice features, especially once combined with PowerToys. I still prefer the way Windows manages Windows compared to my mac which I need 3 third party apps at this point to make usable, and WSL2 is neat, windows has native SSH now, etc.
It could be a great OS if Microsoft could get their heads out of their rears and fix the performance issues, and stop with the advertising, telemetry and dark patterns.
- Telemetry doesn’t affect end users in terms of functionality or performance, and every commercial OS has telemetry. People cite telemetry as a reason not to upgrade to 10/11 but even Windows 7 had telemetry. It isn’t even really that much of a privacy issue if you really dig in to what Microsoft collects and you’ve spent ten seconds in the privacy and security settings. People just like to complain.
- Right click menu latency is such a non-issue and that issue is specifically in file explorer and not other applications. I do think they need to make improvements to that experience like having the legacy right click behind the new one but it’s not a big deal day to day.
- Everyone likes to complain that you can’t move the taskbar. Can you move the menu bar on Mac? Can we not just accept that this is a design decision and move on?
- Is search garbage? Seems to work fine for me and seems identical to Mac and Linux quick searching functionality, and if I need something more powerful I just use Everything.
It actually is a pretty great OS, but like every OS it’s not perfect and never will be.
> Can you move the menu bar on Mac? Can we not just accept that this is a design decision and move on?
Yes, you can put the Dock on any side of the screen, plus you can pin it to the beginning or end of the chosen side. Those options have been in there since 10-dot-0 even before there was official UI to control them. TinkerTool was popular for this: https://www.bresink.com/osx/0TinkerToolClassic/details.html
I always move the taskbar to the right on any remotely wide setup that I have - including my 21:9 main. Had it at the top on my sp3. On my current portable (spectre 13.5) it's at the bottom, since I kind of have to use win11 due to the heterogeneous cpu arrangement (how "hard" could it be to port the scheduler to win10... yeah yeah we know), and while it annoys me when I dock it at work, the system (win11 pro, with MS account) absolutely does suck in a lot of other respects.
Right click latency in explorer is annoying.
Opening the settings "app" after first boot takes several seconds because who the hell knows - I personally blame it on moving everything to some thousand layers JS framework since I like being grumpy about that. This is a core part of the OS, FFS. Fairly certain that they have the talent to pull it off properly.
Search has been fine for me.
Language switching almost always breaks during updates - "ghost keyboard layouts" and such. Has been the case for a few years now.
General "we'll shove down whatever we feel like on you" BS.
Just let us pay for "ultimate" (a.k.a. end-user enterprise) and be rid of all the BS.
Getting WSA back (yes, I have the community version) and expanding on connected standby or however they call it now would've been neat, especially on a convertible, but it is what it is, I guess. WSL2 is also quite the improvement. Lots of other small little things like the task manager (not using procexp too often nowadays).
> Just let us pay for "ultimate" (a.k.a. end-user enterprise) and be rid of all the BS.
This would do it for me, and probably many others. People would still complain, but at least it'd be offered.
They can keep the home editions as the adware and copilot editions, just let us buy "Ultimate" without all that (or just leave it as opt-in/toggleable). If the new snapdragon X Elite 2 chips pan out like the early benchmarks show they do (almost on par with the M5 in the new iPad), and if Windows encourages more ARM adoption they could seriously have a legitimate macbook competitor finally.
But that would require MS to divert efforts away from "AI, AI, AI, AI!" so they won't do it.
At the very least, telemetry should be opt-in, but yes I agree it's whatever, there's unfortunately no avoiding it any commercial software today. The dark patterns to lock out usage of local accounts though I take issue with. There's still workarounds for now, but how long will those workarounds exist for non enterprise users?
The right click menu though, I wouldn't call it a non-issue it's a pretty big regression. The legacy right-click menu loads instantaneously. The new one doesn't seem to do any caching either because it's consistently laggy even after an initial load. Is it still usable? Sure, but it's definitely annoying. It's not the only performance regression either.
> Can you move the menu bar on Mac? Can we not just accept that this is a design decision and move on?
Because it was an option in every single windows version up until now. And on macOS I can move the dock to any side of the screen I'd like. Hell, it will even dynamically move if I'm using multiple monitors and hover my mouse where it should be.
> It actually is a pretty great OS, but like every OS it’s not perfect and never will be.
I never said it wasn't. It's got plenty of features I like, use and appreciate. I wouldn't complain if I hated Windows, because I wouldn't care if that was the case. I'm one of the few on here that actually likes and uses Windows, so of course it's frustrating to see regressions.
I’ll admit it’s not the best, but “huge dealbreaker” seems dramatic.
1. It’s not even a requirement for business/enteprise customers.
2. It remains trivial for technical users to bypass.
3. Literal billions of iPhone and Android users live with a similar soft restriction. Like, yeah, you can skip making an account on those devices, but they’re damn near useless in practice without them.
people have unfortunately accepted that as part of using a phone, but trying to impose it on desktops is a very large change imo. it's part of the general trend of users not truly owning their devices.
You can't pin a folder to the start menu and have it list the items in the folder as you could since XP.
The right click menu in explorer is oversimplified garbage that's missing most of the important options without an extra, unnecessary click.
The settings systems still aren't unified, meaning you have to check AT LEAST two places before you find the right settings menu half the time. Sometimes 3.
It takes double the memory it should for something so simple.
Windows explorer in task manager still needs to have the special "restart task" option, specifically because they know it's going to crash a high percentage of the time you use it.
It spies on you with over-intrusive telemetry.
It advertises to you, even though you are (ostensibly) the customer.
It tries to force the Microsoft account.
It tries to force OneDrive.
It tries to force Edge.
Every update resets half my settings that I spent hours configuring.
The updates are often forced on you. I'm not a child. Let ME decide my risk appetite.
It forces their crummy AI into EVERYTHING, and makes you opt out if you don't want all your data hoovered up.
Everything is named poorly and confusingly on purpose. How many damned things are named "Copilot" now? What is Office even called these days?
> 3rd party extensions were causing it to load slowly.
Yep, and I liked it that way. I had piles of right click extensions that I used every day, and if one made it slow I uninstalled it.
Windows is a tool, it shouldn't be any more prescriptive than a hammer. *
> How are you measuring this? How do you specifically know how much memory it should take?
Windows 7 required 1Gb of ram. Windows 11 requires 4Gb (and is unusable with only 4 - windows 7 actually ran with reasonable speed with 1Gb). Windows 11 does NOT offer 4 times the utility or security, it just offers unwanted services.
> It's even more convenient in macOS. It's right on the permanently pinned Finder icon in the Dock!
That made me laugh out loud. Still, if my work crashed and I suggested to the boss that I build a special "restart" button into the menu rather than fixing it I would need to work on my resume urgently.
*EDIT* - Had they made it optional I wouldn't be complaining. Instead you have to use registry hacks to get it back.
I'm not frustrated that things changed, I'm frustrated that it has less functionality than it did before and is more expensive in terms of compute. It does less, but costs more.
> I'm frustrated that it has less functionality than it did before
How can anyone claim that's true? It does a lot _more_ than Windows 7 did. It has Defender as a full built-in suite. It has VBS. It has a completely different scheduler. It supports the App model. It has a mature virtualization framework. It has ReFS (and the ability to disable file system filters!).
...On and on and on. Windows 11 isn't a 7 with a bit of new GUI paint.
I mean, why stop at your Windows 7 v. 11 complaint? Windows 3.11 only required kilobytes of RAM and ran great; NT was the hefty one with a 12MB minimum! But each one ran Notepad, had Word, NT4 had a couple browsers, etc.
Generally commercial OSes don't take away major bits of impactful functionality that are going to magically minimize their footprint.
Sluggish UI, broken sleep, telemetry, advertisements in the start menu and lock screen, forced reboots and general "computer doesn't obey you" design philosophy.
Also just lack of attention to detail. e.g. if you start to search in the start menu and then delete what you typed, you don't get the base menu back; you get "suggestions". So e.g. if you search for "power" or "shutdown" to power off, don't see it as a result, and delete your search, the power button won't be there anymore. You have to close the start menu and open it again to find it. Completely ridiculous design (KDE by contrast has the button and finds the action as a search result with both of those search terms).
Microsoft increases their hostility to the end user with Windows.
They added so much bloat that has become core of the OS. Even XBox game bar is a forced installed feature with their embedded / IoT, same with forcing a Microsoft user account.
Windows 7 embedded allowed for full customization and the end user didn't have to install features a product was never going to use.
Microsoft back end processes have become more aggressive. Their analytics added to Windows 10 cause the computer to eat up a core after startup. This time frame is often when most communication about client issues that have to be resolved ASAP. Instead of the resources going to the user and their clients they go to Microsoft.
Microsoft even hides the resource usage from their background process, such as anti malware and analytics, from the user usage reports. They are purposely trying to hide and mask their deficiencies.
All to push product and features that are not actually used by the majority. Forcing a market instead of allowing it to grow from quality.
Microsoft does not have any completion in the Enterprise OS and management market and they exploit it. CTO and IT managers do not get fired for choosing Microsoft as their users prison. Small companies are the ones that can escape.
You can't drag a file onto a taskbar icon to have it open up in the selected program, or copied to the selected folder. That's the huge blunder that prevents me from even looking in Win11's direction. I'm sure there's many more things wrong with it, but I don't care if it doesn't even do something as basic and longstanding as that.
For me the problem is that the start menu want you to use the search bar, but the search bar breaks all the time. This isn't just on one machine either. I have seen this on at least three different Win11 installs and it drives me crazy. Type anything into the search bar on the start menu and nothing appears in the box, just a big empty black box.
I always have to go and dig through the menu (which Microsoft made more difficult to use to encourage use of the search bar) to launch any application.
There is a service you can restart to get it working again, or you can reboot the machine. But it typically stays working for less than an hour.
Compatibility and tightly coupled legacy components tech debt catching up, ads to get revenue from free users, half baked new UIs made out of slow web tech and more.
No serious effort went into consumer desktop Windows in the past 10 years, most of the upgrades are for Windows Server, Azure and Xbox OS. Windows 8 was their last real attempt and they gave up immediately.
haven't run windows in ages (15yrs). Can't even make sense of windows anymore since at work moved to Mac. Unfortunately, looks like I will need to now since for a laptop (thinkpad - AMD - sleep/suspend might be a dead end)
So what's the 'best' edition of windows ('best' for privacy/least crapware/adware/AI slop)? I can get any version.
Can we as a society either fund QT/GTK or make a good alternative to it that is as solid as Winform was in terms of GUI principles for Linux?
No matter what Linux distro it is, the core issue with it are QT/GTK, they will never give a user peace of mind like winforms did, a winforms program just feels "good" to use, sort of like the feeling you get from using a website done primarily in HTML (Like hardware news or old reddit)...
A lot of the charm that old windows versions had is exactly based on the GUI framework of the operating system, distros are nice and all but they cannot change fundamentally what is wrong with the user interface of QT/GTK.
Anyways until people figure out what is wrong (which is by the way, also wrong with UWP and WinUI 3... Windows 11 did semi recently get ClassicShell support, I recommend you just moving the taskbar to the side and changing the classicshell logo back to the windows 7/vista button... almost makes you feel like you're using a trash operating system.
I know some users held back on the upgrade while Windows 10 still had support, but there's many improvements to privacy & consent in Windows 7 that are worth considering, now that both are about to be equally out of their support window.
It's one of the last versions where the modal dialogs ask "Yes" or "No", instead of "Yes" and "Not now", "Maybe later", or "Ask again tomorrow".
I ran Linux for many years. But I needed to run some software that only supported windows and mac, and wine didn't cut it, so I had to reinstall windows.
I can't tolerate windows. I put up with 10 for a while then went back to 7. 7 was good. Then some stuff wasn't supported so I moved to 11. Couldn't do it. I'd get random garbage like a notification for some "grand prize giveaway". I legit thought I'd gotten adware installed somehow. Nope, official Microsoft notification! Want to configure the system at all? Keep defender from trashing your CPU for fifteen minutes after you compile something? Stop auto-restarts that close everything? Use actual sleep not the weird "connected sleep" nonsense? Tough, you don't get to. If you do it anyway it will revert after your next update (mandatory btw!) or sometimes just at random.
I can't remember a version since 7 that doesn't make me feel like I'm in a bazaar being accosted by freaking rug merchants.
I used to hate macs. I switched to a macbook. I am much happier now despite the occasional annoyances.
I don't want to motivate anyone to switch back to Windows (because Microsoft), but for anyone who doesn't want to or can't switch, but also doesn't want to endure Microsoft's chosen way of entirely ignoring user needs but instead focusing on squeezing money out of them through ads and the collection of user data in Windows 10 and 11, check out the Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC version! It's still supported 'til 2031 iirc. Plus, as it's meant to Enterprises and IoT systems, it's stripped from all the ads, bloatware, and what not. When I installed it first one year ago, I was just sad that I didn't know it earlier. It's everything I ever wanted Windows to be: lean, fast, and (somewhat) minimalistic, at least compared to stock Windows 10.
Can't 100% say whether Windows 11 IoT LTSC is equally good, but from what I've read it also is worth considering.
The fact that this is even brought up as a solution really speaks to how bad Windows is.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-...
> after you install Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation, you won't be able to use the recovery partition on your PC to go back to your previous version of Windows.
Yikes.
> after you install Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation, you won't be able to use the recovery partition on your PC to go back to your previous version of Windows.
I was already sold; you don't have to convince me.
this is the meme you want:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/harry-you-dont-need-to-sell-i...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNOa5Uvjpwo
The fact that this is even brought up as a solution really speaks to how bad Windows is.
i was going to say something similar. the fact that a version of windows that is designed for IoT devises is still usable as a desktop is absolutely ridiculous. imagine using OpenWRT as a desktop...
It's not designed for IoT devices per se, the naming is just terrible. A comparison to OpenWrt is not warranted here, although to reiterate, the naming is terrible.
>It's not designed for IoT devices per se, the naming is just terrible.
IoT was the buzzword of the year when W10 released.
Yeah, bad naming is all it is.
In a way, it is for "IoT" devices...but enterprisey things. Where I work we have it on a few devices that I guess you could call an "IoT" device. Unattended driver kiosks for truck scales, manufacturing equipment that requires windows, industrial control panels, etc.
That's what it is for. A lot of this stuff uses really old software, some of which the vendor doesn't even exist anymore, and it only runs on Windows so these control panels and devices need windows (unless you manage to get some of it working on wine but that's usually not viable in these cases).
So yeah, it's supposed to be a full desktop, because these devices often require it to some extent, albeit a little slimmed down and LTS.
I think HN would be surprised to learn just how many devices run windows out there in the world outside of silicon valley. Windows is everywhere you'd hope never to see it running at.
well, i am not surprised that anything with a GUI would run some form of windows, even ATMs. i would not have categorized them as IoT devices though, but fair point.
but IoT is one of the use cases it is designed for, isn't it? regardless of the naming, suggesting to use a desktop system for IoT is ridiculous.
the comparison to OpenWRT is warranted, if microsoft expects me to run this system on devices that i would otherwise run OpenWRT on.
That's a bit harsh.
The recovery partition has some value. But in an OS reinstall scenario Windows.old is a much more helpful feature.
However, these features won't used by someone installing Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation (Evaluation just means that it's 90 day free trial version). This is because to aquire the non-trial version of the OS you must either be willing to license Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC from Microsoft, or crack the activation. If you crack Windows you do not need the 90 day free trial! And any company which has institutional knowledge of what an LTSC edition is, is capable of running the 90 day trial in a non destructive way (pro tip: put your new OS on a new drive and keep your old drive in a drawer).
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is the best version of Windows 11 I have ever tried, no contest.
You're "supposed" to acquire LTSC through non-official means, not using the evaluation ISO.
So the only way to use Windows, is to use a version that's designed for IoT, and only available through enterprise channels?
It's really selling itself...
That's routine. Windows generally ends up nuking the OEM partitions if you do golden installs.
My theory is that Microsoft offers LTSC IoT in part as a bone to throw the vocal complainants (read: people who use HN) - and that the terrible name is to dissuade standard users.
I just reinstalled my own system with a combination of LTSC and Linux (currently looking at a riced Hyprland on CachyOS) with the understanding that there will be occasional annoyances (but still less so than consumer W11)
I haven't used it, but is Win 11 Pro ad-free?
Pro isn't ad-free by default. With appropriate regedits/privacy scripts/tools you can make it ad-free until an update inevitably reverts/"upgrades" some part of it. It's not hard to maintain it in this state but you are fighting against what microsoft wants the OS to be when you do this.
I've never had a Windows update revert anything like that. I turned this stuff off 3 years ago and haven't had to do anything since. I think this is just FUD that people earnestly believe and repeat because it sounds like something they think Microsoft would do.
Same experience, but from using 11 in a VM. Installing it is eye opening, with all the unskippable Eulas that force you to agree to share your data.
I’m convinced it’s a frog in boiling water situation for people still using windows. It’s so bad.
Hear me out: MS Excel. The one true powerful version only exists on Windows. Another anchor: ODBC drivers. Some good SQL Server connectivity options are only available on Windows. When your captive audience is accountants, traders, and CFOs, it's quite a moat.
You mean the software that can't open 2 differents files if they have the same name ?
And then, somehow, the desktop Outlook is better on mac than on Windows.
On Windows I can't even easily copy/paste from one email to another. It strips out half the formatting and any colors that were there. Nor can I copy email recipients from an email into a new one.
I tried switching to Windows last year and I just couldn't do it. So now my expensive and fancy powerful laptop collects dust and I'm back to my 5 year old m1 (which is somehow faster, usually).
Windows Excel in Parallels on Mac is the best option I have found.
my favprite notfavorite win11 feature is that they broke keyboard layout switching, permanently. It has been reported as an unsolved bug for nearly two years now :-/. in 25+ years, I had been taking it for granted to work correctly. Apparently nobody in Redmond uses the feature.. I am european, and (try to) use it minutes apart. As an extra bonus, MS Teams regularly either ignores keyboard switch, or switches 50% broken, half the keys. But what can you expect, from an app which is a selfupdating web server that installs itself with squirrel :-/
I switched my spare PC from Linux back to Win10, and it's way less annoying than I remember (rug bazaar was right). Maybe because it's not getting constant updates anymore.
There are debloat scripts for Win11 that are pretty effective. I use this one: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
Only issue is that Windows will periodically re-bloat itself - so you have to re-run it after more or less every quarterly windows update.
The only thing remaining that I want to remove but cannot get rid of is edge. Removing edge is only available in the EU for $ome in$ane rea$on. You might be able to get an EU ISO for installation? Unclear to me but I haven’t dug too deeply.
Imagine any other thing treating you like this. Once a week, your IKEA cupboard locks itself and repairs some factory defects. You want something? Tough. Once every half an hour, it opens a random hatch and drops a ton of paper on the floor, full of IKEA ads. It has all kinds of cameras to see if it can sell you other IKEA stuff, but pinky promise, they don't sell images to others, except 700 partners. And every company in the world is petrified of fear about using other cupboards. But good news, here is some stuff a friend of a friend gave you, that stops all this. Mostly. For a month.
I was willing to give Edge a chance years ago. I didn’t see a compelling enough reason to switch, so I stuck with Firefox. However, while troubleshooting some problems on a family member’s PC I got to see what a ‘default’/‘opt in to everything’ Edge experience is like in 2025.
It’s horrifying. Edge is jam-packed with bloat and the entire browser is geared towards monitoring and hoarding every scrap of user interaction that passes through it. The worst part is that the average person likely has no idea just how pervasive Microsoft’s spying and ad-targeting is.
I envy the fact that EU Citizens have the right to decline all of these intrusive “features” foisted upon them by Microsoft. I doubt Congress would ever come close to affording us a fraction of these same consumer rights. Sigh.
Just a data point on the "modern suspend" feature. I have a Win11/Fedora dual boot laptop. Fedora doesn't do modern suspend, at least on that machine. Found that deep, deep down in the "BIOS" (yes, I know, UEFI) menus - so deep that you have to do a secret keyboard dance to even get that menu - is a "enable S3 sleep" option. Figured OK, I'll just get good suspend in Linux and whatever in Windows.
Surprise! Windows 11 likes S3 suspend just fine. Push the button, instant screen off and winking power light... push it again, instant wakeup. So if by some miracle your hardware/UEFI still supports it, you're good. This is a 5-year-old-ish Acer Swift 3 for what it's worth.
Oh, wait, you mean Windows update toggles that setting back? Whoa.
The Windows 11 home version has all the adware garbage. The Pro version is cleaner.
I had to do the same and ran it in a vm on linux.
The forced reinstalls for updates is the worst. Sometimes when working on some Excel file etc at night, I went away without saving (e.g. crying kid needs attention, and I never returned). Auto-saving only works when you store files in OneDrive. So then windows Update will shut down Excel, and Excel often won't create an AutoSave, and then hours of work are lost -- totally intentionally, deliberately, all using Microsoft products that are apparently specifically designed to make you lose hours of work.
Who designs these antipatterns!?
The forced restarts are mind boggling.
What is an operating system? At it's core, an OS is a program to run other programs. Yet this Windows program likes to randomly kill all the programs it's supposed to keep running, at night, when it thinks you aren't looking. It literally fails at the most basic purpose of an operating system.
If they didn't force restart then the patches they release for vulnerabilities would never take effect. What normal user restarts their PC other than when they're having issues?
Maybe they could stop building the OS in such a way that it requires reboots? You know that other operating systems can manage without that, right?
> You know that other operating systems can manage without that, right?
Not for kernel updates (Linux, by default), and not for macOS which is now RO root fs and also requires a reboot because updates are image based, a. la. Fedora Silverblue.
Also FWIW, Windows now has hotpatching, albeit not available to consumers, it's attached to enterprise licensing
You can update the Linux kernel without killing userspace. Granted it's not without reboot though. Just hibernate/suspend to disk and choose a different kernel on startup, it will still load the RAM image just fine; every program will be still running.
> Windows now has hotpatching,
That's kind of my point. Linux is free and can manage, but 40 year old Windows, which is valued to be worth more than the GDP of many nations can't?
They just aren't trying very hard because they don't have to.
> It literally fails at the most basic purpose of an operating system.
Either you've misunderstood who the customer is, or Microsoft has.
Designed to force you to buy a OneDrive subscription? I bet relevant revenue numbers went slightly but noticeably up when this was introduced. Sweet promotion package stuff!
(Also, say early, save often.)
In the early days of Windows 10, it was even worse because the updates could brick your windows install and you would get stuck on a blue screen or a boot loop after it forced you to restart. I've had to reinstall W10 at least a dozen time because of bad updates.
I personally liked the W8 approach to updates. You were allowed to set windows update in a mode that would notify you of new updates but you got to chose when to download/install them. That setting as also permanent and they didn't "accidentally" revert it back during an update.
This has happened with every version of Windows. NT4 SP6 was a nightmare and recommended to skip because it would cause a BSOD. Microsoft had to release SP6a about a month later.
Updates and unbootable systems are nothing new, to treat any OS as a unicorn in this respect is ignoring past history. Happens with Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Mightn't AutoRecover have found a version of your old sheet?
If AutoRecover worked reliably. Excel is only like 40 years old, so AutoRecover doesn’t work reliable yet.
>It's one of the last versions where the modal dialogs ask "Yes" or "No", instead of "Yes" and "Not now", "Maybe later", or "Ask again tomorrow".
This difference captures so much...
I recently setup a minecraft server on an old windows machine and had a hard time setting it to never restart automatically. After reading some support forums I found the menu to control when it restarts but still didnt see an option to completely stop it.
Eventually I found a way that I can't even recall at this point.
So much easier to run mc servers on Linux boxes. You just grab the jvm that version wants and throw everything into a folder and use the jvms java executable on the server.jar.
... Thats also how you do it on windows though?
I agree it's a better OS to run a minecraft server on in general.
Of course, the OS doesn't really matter it's just easier to manage a Linux box as opposed to a windows machine half the time. Especially for a server. Theres a lot of stupid shit you'll see on consumer and even enterprise versions of Windows which I've had to unfortunately deal with for a decade in exchange for money. Since the gp mentioned how frustrating it was I can relate.
Edit: also ufw is so much easier than the windows firewall. That shit drives me insane.
Was gonna say the exact same thing. Getting Java installed is always a bit of a headache but that's really the only hard part. Once your JVM is good, everything from there is easy.
And even the JVM part, it's not HARD, just annoying.
> Getting Java installed is always a bit of a headache
Or equivalent, no?I wouldn't recommend doing it for mc. They keep changing and or using old jvms. What I do is I just go on oracles site and get the jdk they list that works, and run it directly from the folder. Also some distros do make it a pain lol.
Does it really matter? i've run Minecraft servers with Coretto 21 on Arm and had no issues at all even with the weird setup
Ive honestly never heard of coretto but it seems to be basically openjdk 21 under the hood so I don't see why that'd be a problem.
I haven't done this in forever, but last time the recommended OpenJDK answer was somehow not right. Got the Oracle one, had to figure out where you extract the tarball to, fix my PATH, yada yada.
^ this was my experience yeah. Though I didn't even bother with the PATH var I just used an absolute path to the damn binary because I was frustrated.
> didn't even bother with the PATH var
That sounds fine though. The PATH variable is a nicety for the user to not need to type long paths, really like using ~ for the home directory, not for program setup.
PATH was the last thing. I was more annoyed that the recommended way of installing Java in Linux is wrong. That wasted like 30min before I realized.
The instructions on and linked from https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server work fine — I downloaded the JAR file, installed OpenJDK 21 as above, and ran the given command.
I'll accept installing and running software on Linux has an unfamiliar procedure for those used to Windows or Mac.
Even on Windows it can be a hassle because so many links will send you to Java 8 which Minecraft won't run on. Even the official links on minecraft.net sent you to the version that wouldn't run Minecraft for some time.
I'm not sure if you've tried it or not, but sdkman.io is a really handy JVM ecosystem environment manager that makes getting Java (and other JVM langs) really easy to install and switch between.
Makes me think of notices around adult clubs I've seen such as:
"CONSENT: A clear and unambiguous agreement, expressed outwardly through mutually understandable words or actions, to engage in a particular activity. Consent can be withdrawn by either party at any point."
and
"No means No"
What I'm about to say is strongly worded and I understand not a _perfect_ analogy by any means. However, it does sum up my feelings on this issue.
If Person A makes repeated unwanted advances towards Person B, we have words to describe that. But if Person A, a company, makes repeated unwanted advances towards Person B we call that business.
Yes, the decisive difference is, that Microsoft does not act like an adult, you see? That's why the rules do not apply to them. :)
I wish Microsoft would have never changed the business model of Windows away from paid upgrades.
Now they have no incentive to make good upgrades. Instead, they are only incentivized to add privacy-compromising services that nobody wants or asked for.
Nice window you have there, would be a shame if somebody threw a upgrade into it.. should pay insurrance and protection money, so we could save things from "pimprovements"
“Improvements are available… in the previous version”.
I find the idea of people upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 7 sad and hilarious in equal measure.
While both OSes are no longer supported, important software like Chrome still run on Windows 10 and will continue to do so for a while. Staying on Windows 7 means losing security updates, and very soon, not being able to load websites that use the latest web features.
Supermium is a relatively up to date Chrome fork that will work for anything back to XP.
https://github.com/win32ss/supermium
Stop selling Windows 7 so much.. As a 40-year veteran of tech, "latest web features" are usually a red flag for me more than anything.. More spying, more PII selling, more addiction attempts, etc..
> latest web features
What new browser feature made in the past decade has improved the user experience?
Oh my god i HATE the lack of a “no” option! I’ve been meaning to go find a guide for editing registry to disable the windows 11 upgrade requests, but now I worry that might not exist?
Also the last one where important features were not reserved for enterprise volume licenses but available in the Pro version.
Do you have some examples?
https://admx.cengizyilmaz.net/policy/configure-windows-spotl... “Note: This policy is only available for Enterprise SKUs”
https://admx.cengizyilmaz.net/policy/force-a-specific-defaul... “Note: This setting only applies to Enterprise, Education, and Server SKUs.”
https://admx.cengizyilmaz.net/policy/disable-all-apps-from-m... “This setting applies only to Enterprise and Education editions of Windows.”
And of course the really important one where only Enterprise is allowed to fully disable Telemetry: https://admx.cengizyilmaz.net/policy/allow-diagnostic-data “Diagnostic data off (not recommended). Using this value, no diagnostic data is sent from the device. This value is only supported on Enterprise, Education, and Server editions.”
Well, you can remove the Windows spotlight stuff from the lock screen through the regular settings. Change it from Windows Spotlight to picture or whatever, and remove "Weather and more" from the "show detailed status". I'd say the ability to disable that through Group Policy stretches the definition of "important feature"
I'm not sure I'd agree those policies are enough to truly argue Windows 7 was a last version to not separate out important features to Enterprise -- I'd actually instead simply make the larger point that before Windows 10, Windows wasn't a chintzy ad-driven whorehouse.
Windows 7 is still dramatically less secure by design (i.e. not missing patches but architectural changes) compared to Windows 10, even Windows 8 had some meaningful kernel security features that 7 lacks. This includes sandboxing measures that Chrome & Firefox use, meaning you're still less secure even if you're not downloading shady software.
You're frankly better off applying a bunch of registry changes to 10, using a Education or N (EU) edition "illegally", or blocking DNS than going back to 7 just for privacy concerns. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I don't know much about MS Windows, but can you install Windows 7 and then install a newer kernel? Maybe also updating the kernel wrapping library?
No, they're tightly coupled together. Even same-release updates update both the kernel and the userland syscall-implementing DLLs to match.
Ok, can you update the kernel and the userland syscall-implementing DLLs?
Meh... technically, you're probably right. In practice, it probably won't make a damn bit of difference. It's just like how everybody was scared to run without anti-virus years ago. More people got their computers fucked up by AV than by actual viruses. Still to this day Defender is there fucking up your computer and really not doing a great job protecting you from anything. Ransomware is still running amok despite everything being "up to date" and running AV, and 30 different corporate security defense suites.
If "support" doesn't allow opting out of their actively user-hostile decision making, I seriously question the value of "support" at all. In many ways I'd rather my computer go to some Russian botnet than trust an American corporation with my data—at least the former has a chance of getting shut down.
I'm so frustrated with Windows 11.
I recently bought a laptop and that came with Windows 11.
After hours of trying to work around the OOB "experience" that really really wants to you to sign up for a Microsoft account I finally managed to circumvent it.
After using it for a while I actually like it. It's smooth and no major glitches.
Then I didn't use my laptop for a while, logged in and was greeted with
"Let's finish setting up your account". Only options are "Remind me again x days later" and "Ok"
This is so obnoxious behavior it really makes me want to just roll over the whole machine with Linux.
I wish the clowns from the marketing department hadn't taken over the Windows product division. My laptop is already setup thank you very much. I don't need your condesdencing dark pattern UX BS in my face.
You are not the target audience. In fact, Microsoft would probably prefer if you switched to Linux
Actually not, that is why WSL exists.
I use a few utilities to tame Windows 11 and make it work more like Windows 7, 8, and 10. It should get rid of that "Remind me again" thing, I haven't seen it in a long, long time. No ads, no crap from Microsoft.
https://pxc-coding.com/donotspy11/
https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/releases
https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/releases
I have an old laptop that boots Windows 7 and in my opinion, it's peak Windows (having used everything from 98SE onward, including 2K). It feels modern in a way that older entries don't but doesn't have the annoying and user-hostile elements of newer entries. The visual style is slightly dated feeling but it wouldn't take a whole lot of work to fix that.
It has the old settings menus right?
I think it was windows 8 or 10 that introduced the new menus which I found somehow both too simplistic and harder to navigate. And then sometimes you get lucky and figure out a way to open the old menus to do what you actually want.
I think Windows 7 was my favorite as well.
Yeah it still uses the old Control Panel system, which is far from perfect (it's really bad about "dialog tunnels" where some things are buried too many levels deep), but overall is more servicable for technical users.
Another thing that it has over XP is that it's better at providing a minimally usable environment post-install, with a better payload of default drivers. I don't miss booting into 256 color 640x480 and trying to get all the hardware in a functional state without a network connection like was a frequent occurrence with XP and older.
The new menus are really fun in 11, where it starts out new, and then when you want more info pretty much everything changes back (font/kerning/color) to the point of feeling you need to do a doubletake. Its something that if it happened online you'd swear you've been slip-streamed and shouldn't continue. Guess they dont have anyone who can move over the old items to the new look, go figure.
The old dialogs used to be extensible, in that getting random software like mouse drivers to just add a new tab to the mouse control panel was the way to do things. The new one is, as far as I know, not that. So there's a chance that they left random bits alone because they're afraid to break things.
Or that's merely the justification to push back against the designers…
I always try to reach to arrive at the old configuration before I even consider looking at the text, the newer version just wastes my time and the setting is never there or labelled wrong.
Respectfully disagree. NT/Win2000 was the peak as it was before they added all the DRM/phone home junk. It ran fast, in fact diablo ran smoother on it than on the win 98 partition I had at the time. Granted some programs failed because they were doing things memory wise they should not been doing...
2K was amazing compared to 98, but 7 has a number of QoL and tech improvments that I'd have a hard time giving up, and it's easier to make 7 better behaved than to bring 2K into the modern era.
NT4-reboot-for-any-NIC-change was peak?
NT4 had a lot of issues. Good foundation, but not 'peak'.
I mean... I'll gladly reboot my computer for a network change if it means the rest of the OS isn't a piece of shit.
It did BSOD quite a bit from other-than-shit-manufacture-display-or-printer-drivers.
I could have stayed on Windows 7 for the rest of my life.
I use macOS now and basically hate it.
(but to be honest I have never used Windows 11 and barely used 10)
Give KDE Plasma a shot! You can even try it in QEMU with virgl for graphics acceleration without risking anything more than an hour or two of time setting it up.
https://github.com/knazarov/homebrew-qemu-virgl
Well I'm on macOS because I have a M1 laptop...
Also I use a lot of audio softwares and it's hard to run them on Linux, I would need to try how much those download managers (another rant worthy subject) and Windows VSTs can really run on Linux. But when I get a new PC I will.
I mean, virtualizing with good hardware acceleration and integration can kind of be the best of both worlds, right? You're not replacing macOS, you're supplementing it with FOSS software that you _may_ find more tolerable, and if not, just use the same software and workflow that you have been.
Windows 10 is great. It finally made me to switch to Linux with KDE. Couldn't be happier.
I hated how much 7 bloated the base installation size (10x or more) versus late versions of XP, but otherwise, yeah, it's by far the best desktop OS they've made.
(EDIT: Actually maybe it was Vista that introduced the inexplicable massive installation size bloat? My memory is fuzzy there)
Yep, Windows 7 is basically Vista SP3 + the new taskbar.
Early betas of Windows 8 had a refined Aero style that I still think looks great today. https://postimg.cc/dL3rxwvF
Yeah that's not bad looking at all. What happened to UI styling and the theming engine in 8 was a travesty. It was so ugly and because the theming engine had been gutted, the user couldn't even fix it with third party visual styles.
That's maybe 11's single saving grace: it course corrected and Fluent actually looks pretty good. If only the rest weren't awful.
Windows 11 is inoffensive where Windows 8 was ugly. But Windows 8's visual style was more functional. Windows had borders. Menus and dialogs had contrast and shadows. The focused window was obvious.
See also: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_8_build_8172
Eh, i prefer the round corners in 7. Those windows look like they'll cut and bleed your fingers if you touch their edges :-P
To be fair, you would cut yourself and bleed in betas.
> The visual style is slightly dated feeling but it wouldn't take a whole lot of work to fix that.
This was fixed in 2010, about 15 years ago. And it's still the nicest looking UI of any desktop OS to this date:
https://www.deviantart.com/zainadeel/art/Shine-2-0-for-Windo...
It's what "liquid glass" wishes to be.
The Vista/7 era of visual styles had so many good entries. You could throw a dart at the VSStyles DeviantArt page blindfolded and hit something nice looking. Frankly it still severely outclasses the Linux theming scene.
W8 and W8.1 are atrocious out of the box but you can customize them to make it even better than W7. Swapping the start menu for something good and customizable like Stardock Start8 will completely change the experience and remove 95% of the problem people have with that OS.
I kinda mentioned it in another comment but I don't think I could make 8/8.1 work no matter how good it is unless the awful theme engine could be replaced wholesale with that of 7. It's just so hideous.
I still have Windows7 on my fathers computer and it's more than enough for him (Firefox + FreeCell). We are behind NAT and he doesn't open anything except for a couple of pages + has uBlock.
The whole hype around Win10 loosing support is way overblown…
Worth noting that "behind NAT" is not a security measure. Technologies exist that circumvent NAT to various degrees (and that's usually without malicious intent!). WebRTC is a famously annoying example of this where it's got tons of legitimate applications but has also been responsible for serious security issues, especially in earlier implementations.
The same set of tools exist with different names to punch the same sorts of holes automatically in ipv6 firewalls, so are ipv6 firewalls also not security measures?
“We are behind NAT” just means you’ve got a router / home network like everyone else does these days right? Or am I missing something more here.
If you get IPv6 from your ISP you're usually not "behind NAT", even if your home router does NAT IPv4 or your ISP does CGNAT for IPv4.
I am a blue collar layperson (who only understands IPv4's limitation as a lack of total available IP addresses) that disables IPv6 (at the router level) for this exact reason — I feel like I am losing the little bit of control that being "behind NAT" allows on a private IP range/network (e.g. firewall; port mapping).
Obviously I still use Windows 7 Pro 64-bit as my only Microsoft computer — also have an Ubuntu dual Xeon (for LLM/crypto) and several Apple Silicon products (for general browsing).
You're misunderstanding the purpose of NAT, which is not a security boundary. Apple, for instance, has (or had) nearly all of their workstations on a public IP space.
You can still equally as effectively firewall and port map devices on public IPs as you can behind NAT -- and actually just a bit easier, since you're taking NAT out of the picture.
Do you have a gateway that doesn't do ipv6 firewalling (e.g. allow outgoing, only allow established incoming)? I was under the impression that even no-names manage to get that correct. Why would you need port mapping if not for NAT? Even with NAT, for home use I was always mapping port n to n.
Could be ISP CGNAT, but in principle, yeah, anyone not plugging their computer directly into their modem is behind NAT.
Well it's nice that Firefox maintains a security updated version on Windows 7 (Chrome doesn't) but it's missing the new features.
Maybe I am using some (use mostly firefox at home on my Linux box, other than when streaming certain sites where the picture is better on chrome) - but I can't think of many "new" FFox features I actually like, going back to like version 68 or something.. Every time they introduce something new, I have to disable it or work around it, or whatever.. Just let me keep my "it works" workflow, FFS.
I've had my dad, with similar usage patterns, using XFCE for close to 15 years now. Very few problems with it, I only have to play tech support maybe once a year. Worth considering..
The third option is to install some Linux like Ubuntu or Linux Mint on it.
It is nowadays actually easier to install Ubuntu Linux than a Windows. Just be sure to back up your data to an external hard drive, and restore it from there after the install.
> The third option is to install some Linux like Ubuntu or Linux Mint on it.
Unfortunately, some of us have to be able to actually get work done in our corporate environments.
I wish. There’s still no distro that works well with my 9950X3D + RTX 5080. It’s usually Nvidia’s fault for not playing well with Wayland though.
This is literally my exact build. I'm using Arch Linux with Gnome + Wayland, it works perfectly.
Yeah, I had so many Nvidia/wayland issues that totally evaporated on moving to Arch. I guess that's the benefit of rolling.
It helps to use software and drivers written after your hardware came into existence.
I think it's great that Microsoft are still job-creators after all these years. Just think of all the extra cyber-security jobs they creating by making windows 11 adware and AI infested garbage!
> After that date, users are encouraged to enroll their devices in the Extended Security Updates program for free, which will grant them twelve more months of security updates and plenty of time to plan an upgrade to something supported.
Plenty of time to switch to Linux, you mean.
Windows 7 was the last good Microsoft OS. After Windows 7, I switched to Linux, and the last Windows 7 machine was turned off early this year. I'm surprised there isn't a corporate push for "Windows 7 Forever".
The TPM 2.0 requirement for Windows 11 is making the Windows ecosystem so much more secure. Brilliant gambit Microsoft.
Secure for software and content vendors, not necessarily for the users.
How many trashed Windows 10 PC's are home desktops or laptops used without a password in the first place? But grandma's PC needs secure boot against Tom Clancy level threat actors, it's for her own good.
I have a modern CPU / motherboard (made in the last 4 years) that I spent $2000+ on that doesn't have TPM 2.0. Guess I'm never upgrading to 11.
You might have an option to enable it in BIOS that's turned off by default, that was the case for my desktop PC.
TPM enables VBS, so yes it does provide significantly increased security.
I recently added Windows 7 support to an open source app I run, Kindle Comic Converter.
It was as easy as downgrading a bunch of dependencies (PySide6, numpy) and created a legacy build, and the Windows 7 version got like 2% of downloads (~200). I assume it works since I've gotten no complaints and I don't have a Windows 7 machine to test haha, Windows 7 in UTM crashes a lot for me on macOS ARM.
Man people are still using this. I really only did this since I added macOS 10.14 support (prior minimum was macOS 12) and most of the work needed was already mostly done by that. In theory I could even get macOS 10.10 support, but that would require downgrading Qt6 to Qt5
A similar jump is not shown in the Firefox telemetry reports (which are limited to telemetry-enabled Firefox users): https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware
"Statcounter Stats Go Wonky This Month" wouldn't have made enough clicks, I suppose. Even the wording of the 2nd paragraph misses the point - this is obviously not statistical fluctuation. They didn't even bother to look into the more granular data either.
1 in 4 people did not switch to Windows 7 in one week https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk.... It's really quite jarring this is not the focus of discussion.
Something about this statistic is setting off my baloney detector
Maybe the number of Windows 7 users has not changed, but those using Windows 10 and 11 are flocking to Linux. That'd be a net positive change in the Windows 7 percentage. :p
Welcome to statistics! There's lies, damn lies, and statistics.
I just can't understand why Microsoft can just remove all this shit from windows 11. Guys we don't want adds, one drive and all that crap I know you make money on it but let people come to it naturally when it's forced it turns us a way. I keep hearing stories of entire medical offices, small businesses going mac/linux for the sake of not being forced to candy crush it up.
The product you want is offered.
Windows Enterprise/LTSC/IoT (effectively all names for the same thing) are the product offerings delivering what you want. When I need Windows, it’s what I use.
It’s available for $238 from CDW.com or less from resellers.
If you want to play games, you have to do a tiny bit of extra work to get the right frameworks/drivers installed, especially for VR. But this isn’t done to frustrate you, it’s because this version of windows doesn’t come with anything that’s strictly helpful, and Activity Monitor shows a blissfully low number of processes running on first boot. If you want bells and whistles, you’re free to add them yourself.
Note that you're likely paying $238 and still not getting a legit copy of Windows. If you don't have a volume license agreement and a minimum of 5 Windows licenses, you aren't supposed to use the LTSC version of Windows, and they're not supposed to be used for primary desktops. Also you're supposed to have a Pro license for the machine BEFORE you buy LTSC, so that's just more extra costs. You might as well just save the money and pirate it. Not that this will make any difference in practice if you're just using it at home, but still, people should probably know this.
Probably that's just a side-effect of so many people leaving Windows 10 and 11 for Linux.
Win 11 has not changed much since June -- https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...
What's wrong with Win 11 exactly?
> What's wrong with Win 11 exactly?
There's the obvious telemetry, MS account requirement for home editions, and other MS dark patterns for one.
But, Windows 11 performance is still crap compared to 10, and even 7. The right click menu in explorer is still high latency, and if you have a lot of extensions, you see "loading..." and it can take a good full second for all menu options to show up. Also, you still can't move the task bar, search is as garbage as ever (but honestly that's expected from Windows at this point).
Windows 11 does have some nice features, especially once combined with PowerToys. I still prefer the way Windows manages Windows compared to my mac which I need 3 third party apps at this point to make usable, and WSL2 is neat, windows has native SSH now, etc.
It could be a great OS if Microsoft could get their heads out of their rears and fix the performance issues, and stop with the advertising, telemetry and dark patterns.
- Telemetry doesn’t affect end users in terms of functionality or performance, and every commercial OS has telemetry. People cite telemetry as a reason not to upgrade to 10/11 but even Windows 7 had telemetry. It isn’t even really that much of a privacy issue if you really dig in to what Microsoft collects and you’ve spent ten seconds in the privacy and security settings. People just like to complain.
- Right click menu latency is such a non-issue and that issue is specifically in file explorer and not other applications. I do think they need to make improvements to that experience like having the legacy right click behind the new one but it’s not a big deal day to day.
- Everyone likes to complain that you can’t move the taskbar. Can you move the menu bar on Mac? Can we not just accept that this is a design decision and move on?
- Is search garbage? Seems to work fine for me and seems identical to Mac and Linux quick searching functionality, and if I need something more powerful I just use Everything.
It actually is a pretty great OS, but like every OS it’s not perfect and never will be.
> Can you move the menu bar on Mac? Can we not just accept that this is a design decision and move on?
Yes, you can put the Dock on any side of the screen, plus you can pin it to the beginning or end of the chosen side. Those options have been in there since 10-dot-0 even before there was official UI to control them. TinkerTool was popular for this: https://www.bresink.com/osx/0TinkerToolClassic/details.html
The dock is not the menu bar.
I always move the taskbar to the right on any remotely wide setup that I have - including my 21:9 main. Had it at the top on my sp3. On my current portable (spectre 13.5) it's at the bottom, since I kind of have to use win11 due to the heterogeneous cpu arrangement (how "hard" could it be to port the scheduler to win10... yeah yeah we know), and while it annoys me when I dock it at work, the system (win11 pro, with MS account) absolutely does suck in a lot of other respects.
Right click latency in explorer is annoying.
Opening the settings "app" after first boot takes several seconds because who the hell knows - I personally blame it on moving everything to some thousand layers JS framework since I like being grumpy about that. This is a core part of the OS, FFS. Fairly certain that they have the talent to pull it off properly.
Search has been fine for me.
Language switching almost always breaks during updates - "ghost keyboard layouts" and such. Has been the case for a few years now.
General "we'll shove down whatever we feel like on you" BS.
Just let us pay for "ultimate" (a.k.a. end-user enterprise) and be rid of all the BS.
Getting WSA back (yes, I have the community version) and expanding on connected standby or however they call it now would've been neat, especially on a convertible, but it is what it is, I guess. WSL2 is also quite the improvement. Lots of other small little things like the task manager (not using procexp too often nowadays).
> Just let us pay for "ultimate" (a.k.a. end-user enterprise) and be rid of all the BS.
This would do it for me, and probably many others. People would still complain, but at least it'd be offered.
They can keep the home editions as the adware and copilot editions, just let us buy "Ultimate" without all that (or just leave it as opt-in/toggleable). If the new snapdragon X Elite 2 chips pan out like the early benchmarks show they do (almost on par with the M5 in the new iPad), and if Windows encourages more ARM adoption they could seriously have a legitimate macbook competitor finally.
But that would require MS to divert efforts away from "AI, AI, AI, AI!" so they won't do it.
At the very least, telemetry should be opt-in, but yes I agree it's whatever, there's unfortunately no avoiding it any commercial software today. The dark patterns to lock out usage of local accounts though I take issue with. There's still workarounds for now, but how long will those workarounds exist for non enterprise users?
The right click menu though, I wouldn't call it a non-issue it's a pretty big regression. The legacy right-click menu loads instantaneously. The new one doesn't seem to do any caching either because it's consistently laggy even after an initial load. Is it still usable? Sure, but it's definitely annoying. It's not the only performance regression either.
> Can you move the menu bar on Mac? Can we not just accept that this is a design decision and move on?
Because it was an option in every single windows version up until now. And on macOS I can move the dock to any side of the screen I'd like. Hell, it will even dynamically move if I'm using multiple monitors and hover my mouse where it should be.
> It actually is a pretty great OS, but like every OS it’s not perfect and never will be.
I never said it wasn't. It's got plenty of features I like, use and appreciate. I wouldn't complain if I hated Windows, because I wouldn't care if that was the case. I'm one of the few on here that actually likes and uses Windows, so of course it's frustrating to see regressions.
you didn't address the MS account requirement, which is a huge deal breaker
I’ll admit it’s not the best, but “huge dealbreaker” seems dramatic.
1. It’s not even a requirement for business/enteprise customers.
2. It remains trivial for technical users to bypass.
3. Literal billions of iPhone and Android users live with a similar soft restriction. Like, yeah, you can skip making an account on those devices, but they’re damn near useless in practice without them.
Okay, I'm glad you're used to it, but why are you defending it?
people have unfortunately accepted that as part of using a phone, but trying to impose it on desktops is a very large change imo. it's part of the general trend of users not truly owning their devices.
You can't pin a folder to the start menu and have it list the items in the folder as you could since XP.
The right click menu in explorer is oversimplified garbage that's missing most of the important options without an extra, unnecessary click.
The settings systems still aren't unified, meaning you have to check AT LEAST two places before you find the right settings menu half the time. Sometimes 3.
It takes double the memory it should for something so simple.
Windows explorer in task manager still needs to have the special "restart task" option, specifically because they know it's going to crash a high percentage of the time you use it.
It spies on you with over-intrusive telemetry.
It advertises to you, even though you are (ostensibly) the customer.
It tries to force the Microsoft account.
It tries to force OneDrive.
It tries to force Edge.
Every update resets half my settings that I spent hours configuring.
The updates are often forced on you. I'm not a child. Let ME decide my risk appetite.
It forces their crummy AI into EVERYTHING, and makes you opt out if you don't want all your data hoovered up.
Everything is named poorly and confusingly on purpose. How many damned things are named "Copilot" now? What is Office even called these days?
> The right click menu in explorer is oversimplified garbage that's missing most of the important options without an extra, unnecessary click.
3rd party extensions were causing it to load slowly.
> It takes double the memory it should for something so simple.
How are you measuring this? How do you specifically know how much memory it should take?
> Windows explorer in task manager still needs to have the special "restart task" option
It's even more convenient in macOS. It's right on the permanently pinned Finder icon in the Dock!
> 3rd party extensions were causing it to load slowly.
Yep, and I liked it that way. I had piles of right click extensions that I used every day, and if one made it slow I uninstalled it.
Windows is a tool, it shouldn't be any more prescriptive than a hammer. *
> How are you measuring this? How do you specifically know how much memory it should take?
Windows 7 required 1Gb of ram. Windows 11 requires 4Gb (and is unusable with only 4 - windows 7 actually ran with reasonable speed with 1Gb). Windows 11 does NOT offer 4 times the utility or security, it just offers unwanted services.
> It's even more convenient in macOS. It's right on the permanently pinned Finder icon in the Dock!
That made me laugh out loud. Still, if my work crashed and I suggested to the boss that I build a special "restart" button into the menu rather than fixing it I would need to work on my resume urgently.
*EDIT* - Had they made it optional I wouldn't be complaining. Instead you have to use registry hacks to get it back.
I'm not frustrated that things changed, I'm frustrated that it has less functionality than it did before and is more expensive in terms of compute. It does less, but costs more.
> I'm frustrated that it has less functionality than it did before
How can anyone claim that's true? It does a lot _more_ than Windows 7 did. It has Defender as a full built-in suite. It has VBS. It has a completely different scheduler. It supports the App model. It has a mature virtualization framework. It has ReFS (and the ability to disable file system filters!).
...On and on and on. Windows 11 isn't a 7 with a bit of new GUI paint.
I mean, why stop at your Windows 7 v. 11 complaint? Windows 3.11 only required kilobytes of RAM and ran great; NT was the hefty one with a 12MB minimum! But each one ran Notepad, had Word, NT4 had a couple browsers, etc.
Generally commercial OSes don't take away major bits of impactful functionality that are going to magically minimize their footprint.
Way to pick and choose your points to argue.
Feel free to pick and choose the rest.
Sluggish UI, broken sleep, telemetry, advertisements in the start menu and lock screen, forced reboots and general "computer doesn't obey you" design philosophy.
Also just lack of attention to detail. e.g. if you start to search in the start menu and then delete what you typed, you don't get the base menu back; you get "suggestions". So e.g. if you search for "power" or "shutdown" to power off, don't see it as a result, and delete your search, the power button won't be there anymore. You have to close the start menu and open it again to find it. Completely ridiculous design (KDE by contrast has the button and finds the action as a search result with both of those search terms).
Microsoft increases their hostility to the end user with Windows.
They added so much bloat that has become core of the OS. Even XBox game bar is a forced installed feature with their embedded / IoT, same with forcing a Microsoft user account.
Windows 7 embedded allowed for full customization and the end user didn't have to install features a product was never going to use.
Microsoft back end processes have become more aggressive. Their analytics added to Windows 10 cause the computer to eat up a core after startup. This time frame is often when most communication about client issues that have to be resolved ASAP. Instead of the resources going to the user and their clients they go to Microsoft.
Microsoft even hides the resource usage from their background process, such as anti malware and analytics, from the user usage reports. They are purposely trying to hide and mask their deficiencies.
All to push product and features that are not actually used by the majority. Forcing a market instead of allowing it to grow from quality.
Microsoft does not have any completion in the Enterprise OS and management market and they exploit it. CTO and IT managers do not get fired for choosing Microsoft as their users prison. Small companies are the ones that can escape.
You can't drag a file onto a taskbar icon to have it open up in the selected program, or copied to the selected folder. That's the huge blunder that prevents me from even looking in Win11's direction. I'm sure there's many more things wrong with it, but I don't care if it doesn't even do something as basic and longstanding as that.
For me the problem is that the start menu want you to use the search bar, but the search bar breaks all the time. This isn't just on one machine either. I have seen this on at least three different Win11 installs and it drives me crazy. Type anything into the search bar on the start menu and nothing appears in the box, just a big empty black box.
I always have to go and dig through the menu (which Microsoft made more difficult to use to encourage use of the search bar) to launch any application.
There is a service you can restart to get it working again, or you can reboot the machine. But it typically stays working for less than an hour.
Compatibility and tightly coupled legacy components tech debt catching up, ads to get revenue from free users, half baked new UIs made out of slow web tech and more.
No serious effort went into consumer desktop Windows in the past 10 years, most of the upgrades are for Windows Server, Azure and Xbox OS. Windows 8 was their last real attempt and they gave up immediately.
It removes features and is slower and less productive, while offering...?
They are force feeding their AI and bloat a bit shit too hard and scared "normal" users off with it.
The initial trigger was their Telemetry you cannot switch off. That stuff had a huge extremely negative press exposure for many months.
W11 is basically burned.
It's like, long as I'm gonna be unsupported, may as well go back to the last good version. I love it.
Something smells fishy
haven't run windows in ages (15yrs). Can't even make sense of windows anymore since at work moved to Mac. Unfortunately, looks like I will need to now since for a laptop (thinkpad - AMD - sleep/suspend might be a dead end)
So what's the 'best' edition of windows ('best' for privacy/least crapware/adware/AI slop)? I can get any version.
Can we as a society either fund QT/GTK or make a good alternative to it that is as solid as Winform was in terms of GUI principles for Linux?
No matter what Linux distro it is, the core issue with it are QT/GTK, they will never give a user peace of mind like winforms did, a winforms program just feels "good" to use, sort of like the feeling you get from using a website done primarily in HTML (Like hardware news or old reddit)...
A lot of the charm that old windows versions had is exactly based on the GUI framework of the operating system, distros are nice and all but they cannot change fundamentally what is wrong with the user interface of QT/GTK.
Anyways until people figure out what is wrong (which is by the way, also wrong with UWP and WinUI 3... Windows 11 did semi recently get ClassicShell support, I recommend you just moving the taskbar to the side and changing the classicshell logo back to the windows 7/vista button... almost makes you feel like you're using a trash operating system.