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Windows 11 is failing as an operating system (tilvids.com)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:46 Sponsor: TuxCare Radar

02:23 Windows 11 is failing right now

05:20 What's the job of an OS?

06:51 Updates break systems. Often.

10:53 You have to adapt to it

15:14 It's highly intrusive

17:44 Debloating tools don't make it good

20:19 Windows fails at being an OS

21:33 Alternatives are better, but not perfect

27:23 Windows is a sales platform, not an OS

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[–] 15 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (12 children)

Maybe it’s because I neutered my W11 and only dual boot to launch the occasional game or Windows specific driver, but… I haven’t had significant issues with W11? Not that I can remember over the past two years.

No broken updates, no weird copilot things, no excessive background usage, nothing. The only maintenance I do is manually updating graphics drivers.

It wastes none of my time.

The one issue I had was the LG monitor debacle, that tried to install Mcafee, but that was LG’s fault (and I’m never, ever buying an LG display again, as long as I live. I hope you’re happy, LG marketing).

I find this remarkable, because to me it means, Windows doesn’t have to be junk, yet they deliberately configure it that way, and make it extremely difficult to undo. I used a slew of tools neuter it, but I’d have no idea where to start without them.

And to be clear, I use Linux 90% of the time, so I’m not advocating for Windows or anything.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    Maybe it’s because I neutered my W11 and only dual boot to launch the occasional game or Windows specific driver

    Yes, it's that. If you'd use it as your daily driver, you would notice. I do tech support at work and there's hardly a month that goes by without a Win 11 machine sitting on my desk that has - miraculously! - fucked-up drivers or other issues after an "update".

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago

    I have experienced all of that on my work machine. Its a mess of breakage and glitches and background stalls. Group policy initially stopped copilot but now its back again... And its always just enough to mess up your mouse flow

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    I think a lot of the issues people experience on windows can be mitigated by disabling certain things or as you said "neutering" it. Back when I used windows 10 as my main OS, I did a lot of modification to make it better and it was alright, but windows 11 has also experienced a lot more bugs and criticism just being generally worse. Worse resource management, less user freedom, more tracking, more ai, newer CPU requirements, and that's all just off the top of my head.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    a lot of the issues people experience on windows can be mitigated by disabling certain things or as you said “neutering” it.

    Wouldn't it be great if an operating system just worked properly out-of-the-box?

    There are Arch distributions that do that better than Windows 11. What's Microsoft's excuse?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago (5 children)

    Any neutering tool recommendations?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    There's a good one called Ubuntu.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    I mean, yeah. Though that's less recommended these days. I run Debian on proxmox for different server needs. And my laptop is fedora bluefin.

    Desktop, as infrequently used as it is, still runs Windows for the few times a year when I absolutely need Windows on bare metal. Plus I keep a Windows 10 VM on the server for the one every month or two that I need it. Try as I might to get away from windows, when you're part of a team, and the only one running Linux, sometimes you get weird incompatibilities, and you just need to do it on Windows 🤦‍♂️

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago*

    I would be careful with any "neutering" tools then, depending on your work, because some can mess with Teams, CoPilot, or whatever else you need. Check the options before you run the tools.

    Windows Store apps like Teams work fine for me, though, as do IDEs.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

    Honestly I don’t know which projects are up to date, so I’m afraid to recommend what I vaguely remember.

    Search GitHub/Gitlab for “windows debloat” or similar concepts, and sort the results by date updated (e.g. the most recent commit). This is precisely what I’d do with a fresh Windows install, anyway.

    On top of that, I go through running services one by one and disable the ones I don’t need.

    I disable Defender active protection (except for the firewall/anti tamper) as well, as it absolutely tanks the performance of many applications. As one example I measured, it multiplies the startup time for modded Rimworld, and dramatically slows game ticks. It seems to slow Cyberpunk 2077 as well, but not as reproducibly.

    Most “debloaters” won’t do this, as it’s generally not a good idea. But I treat my Windows partition as disposable: nothing sensitive stored, no sensitive data accessible on drives nor networks, data on a separate partition. If it was infected, I could wipe it and reinstall without a care.

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