Every single edition of Windows introduces new forms of bloat and new ways for MS to overreach and attempt to play corporate nanny over a user’s system; why the fuck would anyone willingly upgrade Windows when they have the chance not to?
Win 11 is downgrade to Win 10, and I expect Win 12 to be a downgrade to Win 11. I still didnt decide whether Mint or Kubuntu will be the next OS on my pc. I’m pretty sure Windows 12 has no chance.
I stayed with XP until 7. I stayed with 7 until 10. I’ll probably stay with 10 until the next Windows. Assuming it actually is decent again, and not just even shittier than 11.
I wonder how I’d be considered. I use Steam on Linux on one computer, Windows 10 on another, and Mac on another. Maybe I get counted thrice.
I had to install Win 11 on my work computer and it is still total dogshit. One example - The search from the Start menu never works so you have to pin every app to start or go through the whole app list to find the one you want. Its been like this for a year at least. Things, like my speakers, just randomly stop working and I have to restart to get them to work again.
The context menu! The fucking context menu!
The default context menu is So godawful, luckily you can get the old menu back with some mod applications
Not on my company laptop sadly.
Find out what IT likes and bribe them for a little GPO adjustment…
Yeah that sucks
Not that you should have to, but there are a lot of ways to fix the most annoying issues. Usually reg edits, better drivers and Powershell scripts.
Openshell makes start at least usable: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
Am going through this on our corp PCs.
Lol, I remember using this to fix Win 8 before they added the start menu button back. I might have to set it up again.
Does the job & will let you pare down the menu to the essentials, move start position etc. Can also be deployed and configured by GPO, which has been a godsend.
For the issue that you can no longer tell Windows to show all icons in the system tray, you can manually drag them out of the overflow into the visible part - or slap this into a powershell script and have it run at logon to do so automatically:
$Name = 'IsPromoted' $Value = '1' Get-ChildItem -path $RegistryPath -Recurse | ForEach-Object {New-ItemProperty -Path $_.PSPath -Name $Name -Value $Value -PropertyType DWORD -Force }For the right-click menu being shit, hold shift before clicking, or put this one-liner into an adminstrative command prompt for a longer term fix. Restart explorer or the PC as a whole to apply afterwards:
reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /veSnappy Driver Origin is great for obtaining up to date drivers. I’ve also had good luck pasting the hardware ID into search with
site:driveridentifier.comto snag better drivers. IDs can be grabbed from device manager, under the details tab for the device properties. Example.
I’m one of the many. Hate where tech is headed, I remember hearing about Microsoft wanting to turn windows cloud based with a subscription. Hell no
The other half is running linux, right?
Right?
Or, like me, still on Windows 7, they could just no longer use Steam. Lots of games I can still play on this OS or in my browser. Maybe someday I’ll go back to Linux, or maybe even React, just for the hell of it.
I just use Windows 10 v1809 ltsc, I’m good for a few more years.
I won’t upgrade til they let me use throttlestop with virtualization enabled.
Just get Linux and run a Virtual machine if you want to Game on PC
My LTSC still has time but yeah, the rest of us should be switching to Linux.
im one of them 😬
Gonna repeat something I said a little while ago.
If you’re planning to try Linux but have no experience with it, the best piece of advice I was given is this. Learn how the filesystem is structured. It will make everything else you try to do easier.
You’re also going to get a ton of conflicting advice on which distro to use. Pop OS or Mint are my suggestions. !linux_gaming@lemmy.world is a good resource to know about too
Been using Bazzite. Super simple install, been working really well.
Thanks for this. I loathe the idea of being stuck on a platform that’s hard to use and swarmed by too many angry idiots who only ever say that linux is perfect and everybody who doesn’t think so is too dumb to read. Everything that makes linux approachable is a big win.
Gotta ditch Microsoft though. Ugh. Changing an OS is such a massive pain, regardless of how much of a requirement Microsoft Recall makes it.
Anyway, more stuff like this, everybody! Thank you again.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do a little of that in my younger years, but I’ve calmed down a lot. These days I generally advise caution when someone tells me they want to switch to Linux.
I personally don’t actually think any one variant of Linux is that much harder to use than Windows or Mac. I think the difficulty comes from two things:
One, I think people forget how much learning is involved in those OS’s as well. If you’ve ever tried to teach an elderly grandparent how to use “the computer” then you know first hand how much of this specialised knowledge you can take for granted. Simple things like knowing where to look to change mouse sensitivity as an example, are really challenging to any new user of any OS.
Two, there isn’t just one variant of Linux. It’s biggest strength is also it’s greatest weakness here. It’s amazing that you have so many choices for your desktop environment, but that comes with the major drawback of users needing to understand what a desktop environment is, and why Googling “how to change mouse sensitivity in Linux” is probably not going to return anything useful. You have so much choice in Linux for every little thing. Down to a level of granularity that most Windows or Mac users wouldn’t even realise they’re not getting a choice in. Alsa vs pulseaudio, xorg vs wayland, not to mention the plethora of package managers. Hell even drivers for your video card: proprietary vs open source. And yes, some of those examples boil down to the old way vs the new way, but ALL of this is added complexity, which results in a steeper learning curve for a new user.
So yeah, Linux is hard to use. The learning curve is a cliff, and anyone who thinks it’s perfect is kidding themselves! ESPECIALLY for the user who just wants to play a few games, and maybe do some browsing. We’ll never get the year of the Linux desktop with this mentality!
I do also try to warn new users about this. It is a whole new ballgame, and it will take some effort to get up to the same level of comfort you have in Windows. It really is best to not just jump in to the deep end, and fully wipe your system on day 1.
Start with a VM, then dual boot, and once you’ve stopped booting into WIndows in frustration, then you’re ready to commit.
One thing I promise though, it is 100% worth the effort
My wife is not good with computers. I moved her over to Linux with vanilla gnome. It took one 1/2 hr session and she was off and running. The next day I got a bunch of questions - another half hour. About a week later she said “this is SO much better than windows - I love it!”
Linux is easy to use. Installing and maintaining-no. But using - yes.
how to change mouse sensitivity in Linux
They don’t need to understand DEs or any of that. Press Super (“the Windows key”) and start typing “mouse”. Please teach people how to use PCs properly; this is the fastest way to access any program or setting in both Windows and popular DEs: Cinnamon, KDE, MATE… Windows will even happily send anything you type here to Bing for easy web search by default 😑
OK so I think you might be joking but in case you’re not:
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“They don’t need to understand DEs” and “Please teach people.” Well which is it? is it intuitive or does it need to be taught? It can’t be both
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That was just an example. Your solution doesn’t solve the problem I’m describing as a whole and I think my point still stands. Search might be common to most DEs but that doesn’t change the fact that they all work slightly differently, and if you want to know how to do something that can’t just be searched for, you need to know what DE you’re using. Which means knowing what a DE is. Not to mention, a user coming from a Mac wouldn’t think to just hit super anyway. It’s cmd + space there.
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It’s not the “proper” way, it’s just “a” way. There is no “proper” way do to this kind of thing. I would even argue that it’s not even the “best” way because you’re not learning how to navigate your OS/DE if you do it that way.
This is exactly the kind of facetious bs “ugh, it’s not hard, just rtfm, noob” response the op is talking about
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You can’t get stuck on Linux any more than you can get stuck on Windows. Every OS is just one short install away. And if you switch to Linux, there will come a point, like there is with everyone who tries it, when you start experimenting with different distros and downloading new ones to try every week, before you probably end up settling back on the one you started with.
I’ll second PopOs, I was sick & tired of windows, I’d wanted Linux for a while and tried a few, PopOs just clicked for me and I’ve not had one problem gaming (which is what I mainly do). 20 min install time and not one problem since, which is about 14 months.
I’m currently on Pop for the last couple years and I’m really happy with it. Being stuck based on 22.04 is getting a little old, but at least it means no new big bugs (in theory).
I was stuck too and I had to reinstall everything to get the upgrade done. That’s the Linux game
Honestly, even if I don’t like Snaps that much, Ubuntu/Kubuntu ain’t so bad after all. I’ve been running it as a daily for months now on my Linux-only gaming PC and it’s working quite well. There’s good support for proprietary drivers and media codecs out of the box.
And personally, I’d advise on using the Kubuntu version because KDE is so much closer in terms of desktop paradigm than Gnome.
And Fedora ain’t bad either.
Ye, my dirty little secret is that I’m still running kubuntu on my main laptop (which I do a lot of gaming on as well fwiw.) It’s what it shipped with, and it works just fine. I can’t say I would have actively chosen it, but It’s also not bad enough to make me want to go through the hassle of installing something else
It’s like a Honda Civic. It’s just reliable and easy to maintain with good performance and some good features and some you don’t really want but are still practical. And there’s a big community giving lots of support and documentation to tweak it if you want more out of it.
Canonical (Ubuntu) bastardized their own OS. I recommend Mint Debian for noobs; Mint is what Ubuntu used to be when it was good and going Debian gets away from Canonical entirely.
Wait what did they do?
Snaps, their own app-in-a-box format. Which would be fine, except they’re provided only by Ubuntu’s closed-source Snap Store, have larger size and inferior performance because dependencies are redundantly rolled into each one, and the worst part is that they started turning nearly every app in their OS into a Snap. If you
sudo apt install firefox, you get a Firefox Snap instead of a native package.
You’re clearly wrong. The answer is Arch
OK, but seriously. There are two main general use families:
Debian based and redhat based
Pick something that has a DE out of the box. Use it. The big ones used to be GNOME and KDE. I dont know which one is more recommended now.
Find equivalent programs (ie. Notepad -> gedit, adobe pdf reader -> evince).
Figure out the windows start menu equivalent: how do I access my programs?
Maybe six months to a year later, learn how to use a terminal emulator.
Maybe a year later, switch to arch and find out why it’s superior
I like the optimism of Linux users thinking there will be a massive flood towards their favourite Linux distro.
When the obvious path the majority of gamers will take is just … not upgrade anything and stay on an unsecure OS until their next major PC upgrade.
Most users don’t care about security as long as it allows them to do with their computer what they want.
If Microsoft didn’t push people to a new version, you know too many would still be rocking Windows 8.
You mean 7, right? Most people skipped 8, and that’s why Microsoft made the update to 10 free.
Yeah, I stayed on xp until I got a new pc during 7, then I stayed on 7 until I got a new pc during 10. I’ll probably stay on 10 until whatever is after 11 comes out, even though I know better, because I just don’t care enough.
No they’d still be running XP if they could.
I know i would, lol! I def fit the type being described. I just jumped over to Linux after having a hard drive crash necessitating the installation of a new OS. I was just gonna go with windows 10 again but it was giving me fits trying to install it for some reason. Starting to wonder if i had a bad PC and not a bad hard drive, i decided to make a bootable usb stick with Mint using an old laptop. Eventually i got it to boot up my PC and i never looked back. Took a little while to get used to the new system but so much of it works the same way as Windows that i had little trouble bridging any gaps. I don’t do PC gaming though, so i probably haven’t run into the problems that i imagine are preventing others from making the leap. I guess I wouldn’t bother going back now even if I could, now that I’m talking about it…I’m very happy with Mint.
Just like skipping Vista was the way to go. We need to skip Win11.
I know someone that is deathly afraid of tracking by Microsoft to upgrade their pc from Windows 8. They won’t spend the time to learn linux, as they use a proprietary app specific to windows for what they use. I point out Win8 has the same kind of data collection and they dismiss it with a head-in-the-sand response.
Microsoft making the upgrade free is them pushing people to a newer version.
They would also be on Windows 7, but too many would be on Windows 8 as well.
Windows had to force updates because so many people just didn’t update
Anyone that is on 10 still isn’t going to go to Linux
I dual boot and still use Windows 10. And everything I’ve seen from Windows 11 just seems like trash to me. My mother got a new laptop about a year ago and I came along to help her set it up. With her previous laptop, I opted to not do the free update to Windows 10 because people were complaining about it at the time (and I was still on Windows 7), so she ended up stuck with Windows 8.1 for years. So this time I did opt for the free update to Windows 11 and it feels like a huge mistake so far.
Her machine is now slow and struggles to get things up and running. And every single fucking time she tries to use it, it decides to run virus scans and download and install updates all at the same time. And these updates often seem to take an entire day. The last update took two days where she could barely do anything on her laptop because it was slowing things up so much.
And that all makes the frustration add up when you come across the other fucking stupid things they’ve done. So now when you right click on the desktop there’s a few seconds where Windows needs to get its shit together to show you the new useless menu that’s been slapped on top of the old useful menu. Then you need to click ‘show more options’ for the actual useful menu. Then another few seconds for Windows to get its shit together to load that menu.
And I don’t want to load a bunch of stuff like classic shell or winaero tweaker because she’s old and just wants to play hidden object games and solitaire. So I’m going to have to come running every time something happens that she doesn’t understand. So I prefer leaving it vanilla.
But fuck Windows 11. It’s absolute fucking garbage based on my experience so far. I was going to hold out for the inevitable Windows 12 because Microsoft seem to love using their paying customers as beta testers with every second OS they release but now I’m not so sure. Hoping there will be some sort of hack to keep enterprise updates coming or something.
Still on 10 here, turned off the TPM chip, got kubuntu on a second drive, just hoping proton can get the other 70% of my vr library to recognise before EoL
Anyone that is on 10 still isn’t going to go to Linux
Eh, there’s a few of us. I intend to at least give Linux a solid try before I swap to Win11.
My thoughts are that at that point I realistically have to swap anyways. It’s just a question of whether I’m going to Win11- which I’ll have to customize to my preferences and generally figure out, or Linux- which I’ll have to customize to my preferences and generally figure out.
I’m on the tech savvy side of things, and I still find Linux intimidating so I don’t think this will be a mass migration to Linux or anything.
I’ve considered Linux a couple times in the past, but generally stayed away because my PC is primarily used for gaming which didn’t have the best support then. Things are kinda different now- support is generally better.
When I was young and dealing with Win 98 and XP before all the service packs updates had like 10% chance of bricking the OS and would give me anxiety so I’d avoid them. Even with Windows 7 had an update that made explorer.exe refuse to start. It hasn’t happened in many years, maybe they got their shit together but I still have anxiety about updates even though I’m savvy enough to fix issues now. Just because I can doesn’t mean I wanna.
I’m still on 10. I’m waffling between installing bazzite on my laptop, building a new computer and installing bazzite, or just using my steam deck as a daily driver. But none of the options include using windows.
If Microsoft didn’t push people to a new version, you know too many would still be rocking Windows 8.
You mean Windows 7
You mean Windows XP.
Surely you mean 3.11
Yea, as someone who games on linux (ArchBTW), I don’t know if its really there yet for mass adoption, I was helping a younger sibling troubleshoot their dying PC and they even suggested I install Linux on it for them. With a fresh Linux Mint iso on my Ventoy USB, the voices raged at me to convert another penguin. But sadly I knew, deep down, they are not ready to deal with the issues if something goes wrong, a software has no Linux support, or if they ever want to mod their games.
Those kinds of people probably wouldn’t be able to deal with issues in Windows either. Just teach them how to install the OS and start firefox. If it completely breaks at some point tell them to install the OS again.
