So far in the last year or so, I've heard 0 reasons why I'd even need, want or benefit from Win11 over Win10. Tons of reasons in the negative column though. There isn't even anything to salivate over that might make you think it might be worth it to deal with the other tradeoffs. Hard pass.
I updated to 11 on my laptop but kept 10 on my main machine. I see zero reason to update my main computer to 11. I was willing to give centered start button a try but the fact that you can't turn off grouping of applications in the taskbar is a deal breaker. If I have two firefox windows open I want to know it and to be able to pick which one I want without having to hover my mouse over the icon for a second while the picture of the windows pops up.
It could be worse. You could be on MacOS where Cmd-Tab switches between apps not windows. I currently have 13 browser windows open (each with 3 to 15 tabs) and another 9 windows of other things (terminal, vscode, etc....) and IMO The Cmd-Tab vs Ctrl-Tab vs Ctrl-Up vs Ctrl-Down suck compared to Windows. I really want to easily switch to the previous window, not the previous app. Command + backtick doesn't work either. It doesn't switch to the previous window. It switches to the previous window "in the same app" which is not actually the previous window as that could be from another app.
Hmm, I find it pretty practical, cmd-tab from one app to another, cmd-backtick to toggle between windows, I mean, it's a different paradigm, sure, but you can still move around from the keyboard? I do find it a little annoying that there aren't consistent shortcuts for moving between tabs in everything that uses them, could be cntrl-tab, could be alt-arrows...
I don't love it (yet). It's probably a combo of my Windows background, my ignorance of MacOS tricks, and actual limitations/flaws.
* Cmd+~ from a fullscreen window does nothing, and non-full windows of the app cycle only among each other. If I have fullscreen windows anywhere in my setup, it breaks my flow and (afaik) makes me mouse to the Window menu. I feel like MacOS's fullscreen paradigm is more to blame here, because it violates a range of other behaviors I'd expect.
* Unlike cmd+tab, cmd+~ doesn't give me a visual overview of my windows (how many? what order?). I can see why, since cmd+tab shows only icons and app names, which isn't enough to differentiate between windows of the same app (unlike alt+tab on Windows, which shows thumbnails, paths, page titles, etc.
* Cmd+~ also cycles in a static order, not most recently used. This feels like fallout from the second point, in that if you're not showing thumbnails it could get confusing.
The first one in particular took me a bit of time to realize; before I did, it just felt broken and made me not rely on cmd+~ at all.
You’re totally right that fullscreen breaks cmd ~. It also breaks cmd tab in unexpected ways.
You’re also right about lack of visual feedback, which is disappointing given the various stuff that I think is still currently branded Mission Control, where obviously the fundamentals are already there.
Cmd ~ isn’t statically ordered though, it’s either application specific or based on recent use in a weird (easy to confuse) heuristic. It follows a similar (maybe identical?) pattern to recent use for cmd tab, and even app switching on iOS.
To your third point, is this a setting somewhere? I tested before I posted w/ 4 Brave windows, but they stay in the same order.
Makes sense, since cmd+~ immediately switches on key down to the next window; cmd+tab (like alt+tab in Win) lets you keep the selection open and choose an out-of-order app, which alters the MRU. How would you do that here? The only way I've affected it is creating/killing windows at points in the cycle. Using cmd+shift+~ for me just goes backward in the same static order.
Some kind of interaction with the window usually (again can be app specific) … reverses the order to the window where this sequence started, then may or may not continue the original order.
I’ve seen this most consistently in apps where I commonly have too many windows open, VSCode iTerm and Chrome being the worst offenders. Edit: my worst offenders, the apps don’t do anything unusual here.
Coming to MacOS from Windows (M1 line made me switch) Rectangle provided some nice window management utility that felt more Windows-like (at least for moving windows between monitors and snapping to each side).
Never really liked the multiple desktop model
Same here, mostly. My laptop since 2015 has been a MBP, so I've had plenty of MacOS experience, but day to day has always been 90/10 Windows. Now that I have the M1 I'm trying to use it daily, so the little grievances are more apparent (but I also have more motivation to solve them).
I've always felt like multiple desktops (on all 3 OSes) have untapped potential, but like you its never worked for me. But hope springs eternal - I try it again every now and then. I'd like to hear more about how some people use it.
Heard good things about Rectangle. I'll check it out.
Sure, and I'm positive you knew which three I meant when I said it: the three that together probably comprise 4 nines of overall desktop use, and which are compared all over this thread.
UX does differ somewhat between, Linux distros & WMs (and Chrome OS, to the extent you consider it Linux proper), and between releases of all three OSes; but within families they maintain broad continuity. I use multiple variants - again daily - and my point stands that all have untapped potential.
But I doubt you supposed otherwise, nor honestly think I'm unaware of other OSes... so why take the time to ask? Pedantry? Did I slight an OS you favor?
I use all 3 OSes ~daily and have nits w/ all of them. This one's minor even as it stands, but if I can make it "click" - at least for MacOS-specific workflows - I'd love to. Each OS shines the best if I adapt to its idioms (vs. trying to make Mac feel like Win, etc.).
The problem is cmd-tab brings everything up. For example, if you have a terminal window and a browser window next to each other that you're flipping between, but there's a browser window under the terminal window, cmd-tab will obscure the terminal.
I use a free application called Spark, which lets me bind global hotkeys to arbitrary things, and in particular those things can be "bring up the topmost window of application X while leaving the rest where they are". I have it set up so that control-shift-h brings up Terminal, control-shift-c brings up Chrome, control-shift-f brings up Finder, control-shift-n brings up Firefox, etc., and for most of those I have "Bring [to] front the main window only" set. I use the hotkeys many times a day.
I’ve done the same using BetterTouchTool [0]. It’s named very unfortunately because it is able to assign a system-wide function to any input device, even MIDI devices. It is highly customizable.
Ah, sure, that makes sense. I guess I tend to be running 2-3 different browsers for different kinds of tasks, Chrome for work, Firefox for personal browsing, Brave for gmail, so I don't typically end up with multiple browser windows in the same browser. If I do for some reason, I tend to minimize all but the one I have been using with cmd-m.
I use one browser with multiple profiles. But even if I ran different browsers to solve that issue I'd have to do the same for everything else. Run 3-5 different editors instead of one editor with 3-5 windows. Run 3-5 different terminals apps instead of one Terminal app with 3-5 different windows. etc....
It’s unfortunate that cmd-tab behavior cannot be customized not to bring all windows in front. It makes a pain working with multiple apps. And, this behavior hasn’t been the case all along, IIRC.
I have alt-backtick mapped to my favorite terminal app in Linux, and control-backtick mapped to a new browser window. I'd be buggered if I ever switched to Mac!
Me and a collegue were having this discussion a couple of days ago. There is a way to do it. It involved bringing up mission control selecting the window then pressing option.
This was the feature that convinced me to buy a Mac ~15 years ago. When I'm working, I keep jumping between a few apps (e.g. browser, emails, terminal, IDE, text editor, PDF viewer, reference manager), and the additional level of hierarchy makes switching to a specific application easy. Before macOS, I was using both Windows and Linux. Alt-tab was often useless in both, because it was flooded with redundant windows.
On GNU/Linux with the Sway Wayland compositor, I have a bunch of keybinds to focus a program by app_id (wayland) or class (xwayland) so I can jump to specific windows even on other monitors or workspaces. This wouldn't solve the issue of multiple windows of the same program, but I find I rarely have such a thing. I bind the actions to ctrl-super-foo where foo is a letter associated with a mnemonic like b for browser or v for video (player). I then also made a key in my qmk (keyboard firmware) config where pressing it once acts as ctrl-super and also like a sticky key where I can let go and then slowly press the next letter instead of holding the modifiers down. I've been very happy with this setup.
I do tend to have multiple terminals (local tmux session, remote tmux session, tmux session dedicated to my text editor), which I launch with custom app_ids so that they all have their own separate keybind.
Just to let you know you can probably get something pretty personalized outside of macOS as well!
> I really want to easily switch to the previous window, not the previous app. Command + backtick doesn't work either. It doesn't switch to the previous window. It switches to the previous window "in the same app" which is not actually the previous window as that could be from another app.
I really can't figure out what your issue is after reading this several times. If the last active window was a different app, you hit Cmd+Tab. If the last active window is from the same app, you hit Cmd+`
I guess it's a matter of preference. I use both Mac and Windows and I prefer Mac's way of doing it. Sometimes I'll have 3 IntelliJ windows open + my terminal, along with a dozen other apps that are on other desktops/workspaces that I'm currently not using. So it's nice that I can bounce between the IntelliJ windows for editing my code with Cmd+`, then when I need to hop into the terminal I do Cmd+tab, do my stuff, then Cmd+tab and I'm back in the code. Maybe it's a learning curve but it feels very natural to me.
> Also, CMD+’ is way more ergonomically inconvenient to hit.
What fingers are you using for Cmd+tab if that's comfortable but not Cmd+`? It's exactly 1 key above tab.
I'm really not sure why you think that would happen. It's like you're saying the Q key is in an inconvenient place because it's too small so "odds are you would hit W fairly often"
It's on the side of the keyboard. If you're on tab, you just feel for one key up.
I have to use a Mac for work, and I've been using WindowSwitcher as a cmd+tab replacement. I liked it enough I paid for it at the end of the free trial.
It's excellent, except I wish the mouse interacted it on click instead of mousover. Still better than the default.
(another tool along those lines I use is uBar, which is a Windows-style taskbar for macOS)
Honestly that sounds like you aren’t garbage collecting enough. I have perhaps 3-5 tabs open in one browser and 3-5 apps open at any time. Also working in VSCode, terminals and browser mostly.
I coworker runs his windows box with about 100 tabs iOS. Sometimes. Just close some shit.
I tend to agree. I have one window from each app open at any time, and dedicated hotkeys to bring up each app. Having to guess how many cmd+tab I'd need to get to the app I want breaks my flow so I set up opt+h to bring up Firefox, opt+j VSCode, opt+k Slack etc etc.
I've been on a Mac since 2008 so ~13 years. I still hate it, not the mac, just this one poorly designed feature ... and a few others. I don't want to have to stop-pause-think "was the last thing I used in the same app or a different app?" so that I can press the right key. Further, I only want the last window to move to the front, not all windows of the same app. Quite often (50-70% of the time?) I have say 3 VSCode windows, 4 terminals, and 3 browser windows. I need to switch between say a terminal window and a VScode window. ideally when I moved the VSCode window to the front and mostly on the right side of the screen the last terminal would stay visible but instead Cmd-Tab brings all the VScode windows to the front, covering the terminal. It's useless. Cmd+~ doesn't help, that only switches within the same app.
The centered start menu is terrible UX. In 10 you just move your mouse to the bottom corner, where in 11 the position changes. Of course, everyone except your grandma knows you can just press the windows key on your keyboard to open the menu. But grandma is also the person least likely to have the dexterity to hit the tiny button in the middle left of the screen.
I think the grandma case is just made up. I've seen older people use win11 just fine, they aren't so incompetent that they can't click a button on their task bar. If they are having trouble with that, then even if they could get to the windows button easily in the corner, they'd have a tricky job clicking any of the things that come up in the windows menu which are all the same size, and now, not even aligned to the bottom edge of the screen! Poor Grandma :)
key word being "easier". Thing is, when something is already easy, claiming "easier" is better isn't really a thing. Given clicking on the windows icon is actually a "sometimes" activity, it doesn't need to be optimized to be the easiest thing.
If you use the Windows+# shortcuts it's pretty easy to navigate multiple instances of an application. I don't know how the ordering works with the centered start button, but traditionally, the left-most application can be switched to by pushing Win+1. The second instance of the first can be switched to by holding Win and then pushing 1 twice. That's been available since Vista.
I don't want to excuse taking options away from users, but there are workarounds.
It still works this way, but I find having to figure out which number to press is too slow. There's a utility that adds numbers to the taskbar buttons when the start key is held down, called 7+ Taskbar Numberer, but it doesn't work on Windows 11.
If you lock programs to the taskbar in a consistent order you can build some muscle memory. For me, 1 is always my browser, 2 is file explorer, 3 is notepad++, and 4+ depends on whether I'm on a work or personal machine (discord at home, outlook at work, etc). The result is that no matter what machine I'm using, I can always alternate between my browsers with Win+1.
On windows 10, holding down the ctrl-button while clicking on the icon will switch to the recently used instance and if you keep clicking it will cycle through the open instances. If you want this behaviour as standard, you can enable it by editing the register.
https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-last-active-click-wind...
I'm annoyed they removed the ability to move the start bar, on a widescreen monitor the side seems far superior to the bottom for me, far less wasted empty space.
re: Explorer Patcher, does it allow the (W11/W10) taskbar to be moved to one of the vertical edges? The github page doesn't mention this.
I prefer the taskbar on the left and the fact that a vertical taskbar is not supported on W11 is one of the principal reasons I haven't upgraded from W10.
I'm on W11 as well and enjoy it over W10 for a variety of reasons (mostly gaming and HDR related), but instead of adding to that noise I just wanted to point out that this change is in Windows 10 as well. From the link, last sentence in the second paragraph:
"As it turns out, Microsoft slipped the update into the final patch Tuesday of 2021 for both Windows 10 and Windows 11."
My HD runs incessantly on Win10, it's SATA, not SSD. Win 10 already pushed out an upgrade ad on my desktop today to my dismay, just installed win10 2 weeks ago, because I no longer had a choice.
Most of the time the HD grind is caused by Chrome scanning my files, but still, I wonder if all the verbose logging and tracking that Win 10+ does now is what made them recommend upgrading to SSDs for the OS'es.
I'm also pretty sure that Win11 has a lot of structural changes made to eventually inject ads into everything as a back-up MS-Revenue Stream plan, so I'll wait for the usual mandatory to update anyway, after there is no longer a choice.
Win 10 since the first insider builds was a terrible experience on mechanical HDDs.
Maybe it's their devs not having HDDs anymore. Who knows. I'm pretty sure it's not the volume of data being read/written. Just a lot of more smaller reads/writes or less attempts at latency-hiding.
Be it the anti-malware, less carefully written system apps or whatever. I think especially XAML stuff had terrible start-up times on HDDs. I remember filing a feedback item because after booting up my laptop it took more than 40s to open up calculator.
Unfortunately, there's one very big reason you'll need Windows 11: that Windows 10 won't get security updates forever. After October 14th, 2025, you'll need to "upgrade" to it to stay secure.
After 30 years on Windows I switched this month to Linux, for pretty much the same reason. It's great. And it feels so fast. All my software exists natively on Linux (minecraft and game emulators for the kids, KNIME, Intellij, and Blender is a lot faster on Linux). No Word or PowerPoint, but there's Libre Office and it's good enough.
Who'd have thought that 2021 would be the year of Linux on the desktop. Not because it has gradually improved (it has), but because the alternative has declined so much.
> As a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop, even I feel that soon Microsoft will have succeeded in making Windows so horrifically awful and user-hostile that the Linux Desktop will start to look good by comparison.
I use multiple platforms at work and that's really the biggest difference to me.
Linux is much faster, like a lot! Specially on older hardware. And not only the filesystem and that stuff. With recent gnome versions the interface is much more fluid too.
At this point I think if you desperately need MS Office, MacOS is the way to go. I will never buy a Windows machine again, and being forced to use it in a work setting would be a deal-breaker. Fortunately at this point even MS isn't stupid enough to make that a requirement as far as I'm aware.
I will stick with MS Office. I can use it when disconnected from everything, and (note hyperbole, but the cynicism is real) I avoid the creepy feeling that Google is logging every mouse movement and keystoke I make for teh ads.
In fact I welcome my evil Microsoft overlord any day before I use something from Google. I see MS as the lesser of two evils.
Always with the Linux. I can't use Linux, I work in a Microsoft world. I can turn off the keylogger, and virtually anything else I don't want/like. I cannot (assuming I used their products) stop Google from storing my (MY!!) data on their infrastructure and having their way with it.
Yes I've tried Libre. ODT files don't play well with MS Office. Pivot tables in Calc are... frustrating. No OneNote, no Outlook, no Visio. Linux doesn't work on my hardware, and Visual Studio doesn't work on Linux.
The distribution fragmentation... I'm expected to install flavour X or Y of Linux not actually knowing before I start that my hardware even supports it? Brain = explode.
Joining a community (Linux) that stomps all over people that have a dissenting view (I actually like Windows - have done since I started using it in 1990) is philosophically not a community I want part of (Stallman is an exception I have a lot of time and respect for).
A VM adds complexity - why would I do that when native Windows is pain-free and just works?
And no, I don't "need" offline editing, I just want it. After all the cloud is a computer just like mine - that happens to belong to someone else. The cloud introduces a risk of data theft and complete data loss. And yes, probability is low, but impact and exposure are both very VERY high. I don't run that risk at all using my own hardware.
Oh boy, don't know if I read that correctly, but it seemed a bit heavy on emotions from your side. It's just an OS and my comment was just a recommendation. And these are just some observations for my own self interest, please read these in a neutral tone:
> ODT files don't play well with MS Office
Can't you save in docx format from within libre office?
> Linux doesn't work on my hardware, and Visual Studio doesn't work on Linux.
Could you elaborate on these two points?
> The distribution fragmentation...
The downside of a strong open source community is that you are spoiled for choice, yes.
> that stomps all over people that have a dissenting view
Not Linux specific I'd say. There are people like that everywhere.
> why would I do that when native Windows is pain-free and just works?
If Windows works perfectly fine for you, then yes, Linux + VM doesn't make much sense. For the rest of us that are not fans of how Windows runs things, it's usually a last resort option and very few people use it.
> I don't "need" offline editing, I just want it.
Sorry, that's what I meant, more like either/or want/need.
> And yes, probability is low, but impact and exposure are both very VERY high.
Definitely, that's why you'll find lots of people in the Linux community that run their own NAS at home and have lots of fun with it.
Lol you read that very correctly, but please don't take the emotion either seriously or personally.
All your points are noted. Importing ODT files into Word makes a mess of formatting and layout. I've wasted many hours fixing documents. Linux doesn't like my graphics card, and on my previous hardware setup wouldn't recognise my ELP web cam, my Windows Phone, and for some inexplicable reason, my Ergodox keyboard.
Visual Studio is software for Windows - it won't work on Linux (I see no benefit in virtualising when I have so many other issues with Linux, plus the real or imagined perf impact of virtualisation - at age 50 I'm way past the place where I spend a week on a PC build just to see if I can - I know I can, I no longer want to).
Yes, there are vocal people behind every technology. I guess I'm just tired of hearing "Linux" as the panacea for all things Windows or Microsoft. I know Microsoft's history. Better than many, having used their stuff starting with MS DOS in '84, maybe '85, and having actually worked there.
You wrote -
If Windows works perfectly fine for you, then yes, Linux + VM doesn't make much sense. For the rest of us that are not fans of how Windows runs things, it's usually a last resort option and very few people use it.
You're absolutely correct in that statement. My problem with Linux isn't that. My problem is what a5aAqU did in his reply to my first comment. He suggested Linux even though my post made my preference clear. This happens almost every time I mention using and liking Microsoft products and technologies.
It's not something I'd ever consider doing to anyone saying they use/like Linux. I love when people get along, regardless of... well, anything. Diversity is beyond value. It's how we grow.
> My problem with Linux isn't that. My problem is what a5aAqU did in his reply to my first comment. He suggested Linux even though my post made my preference clear. This happens almost every time I mention using and liking Microsoft products and technologies.
I wasn't suggesting that you switch to Linux. I was just pointing out that you can't escape the keylogging by using Windows. Linux is the major platform where you can fully control your computer, but it still might not be the right platform for you.
> don't take the emotion either seriously or personally.
> I did not mean to offend.
None taken! Happy that this turned out a healthy discussion.
I was just a bit surprised finding out that there's hardware that doesn't work on Linux. It's been almost the gold standard for hardware support (ignoring nvidia of course). Thanks for enriching my knowledge on that one.
Ah and I seem to have misread "visual studio" as "visual studio code", apologies for that. Yeah most Windows software will always be tricky to get into Linux, that's definitely true.
Your post just made me realise that when I find myself in a OS discussion, instead of starting to list out pros and cons of Linux, I'll just ask if they're happy with their current OS. That should probably clear up a lot of things from the get-go.
Once again, thank you for your post and I hope windows keeps treating you well. If not, you'll always know where to find Linux.
LibreOffice reads and writes MSOffice files just fine. I do it every day. Maybe there are some edge cases that affect someone, but it's never been an issue for me.
Sadly, not for me. Google docs has a hard failure mode in that if your document is hundreds of megabytes in size, docs backs your document up every few keystrokes and everything slows down to a crawl. I couldn't figure out how to turn this auto backup off.
Ubuntu LTS. It also serves for my wife and (small) kids so something easy that works out of the box.
It's great because it gives the kids a computer that's 'theirs' but I can manage their freedom to the level that they're ready for (access to internet etc). And the oldest one (9y) already started to meddle with shell scripts so the experiment seems to work =)
> I'm not old and I have lived to see this sentiment come and go at least twice before. We're still on Windows.
In that time we've seen Microsoft concede the mobile market to iOS and Android and the server market to Linux and Google Docs manage to take a major chunk out of MS Office.
Microsoft is still extremely profitable, but it's not because of Windows anymore. Which is why they're now comfortable risking defection by screwing over the Windows customer more than ever. But that's what happens at the end, not the middle.
It feels like, to an extent, Microsoft was all but admitting they were giving away Windows for home users (how many of us are still on perpetually upgraded Win7 licenses?) and betting (the desktop software sector) on commercial licensing and Office.
I notice a lot of OEM PCs, for example, come with an Office 365 trial install. I'm sure the OEM deal is "Windows is 30 cents cheaper if you include the trial."
But if the OEM is already installing Ubuntu or whatever, they 1) no longer need to negotiate to shave pennies off the Windows license and 2) have an office suite pre-installed, potentially capturing a large number of the easy customers who'd click on the first thing available.
How does Microsoft keep that sales channel open?
I can't imagine them going the road of the shovelware antivirus vendors and outright paying OEMs for presence. But I could see them packaging up a cut down "Linux Subservices for Windows" product. This would be basically a blessed virtual machine package, which OEMs would be willing to include-- or maybe even pay a token sum for-- because, well, people still want to run their games and legacy software. More importantly, it's a way to get millions of people to install a MS-provided package on their desktops, which could include cross-promotional offers and telemetry. (Yes, there will be the inevitable shut-up packages from third parties, but they have those for Windows already).
Thankfully we have options. I'm planning on moving my main desktop to Arch over my Christmas break from work. It's been a while since I ran Linux as my main desktop, my only complaints have been around gaming performance. I have a friend who plays the same games as I do and he's got everything working on his Arch install. That's really the only thing that holds me on Windows and if it's as smooth of a transition as I believe it currently is then I just have no reason to not give it another fair shake.
The only games that I really ever struggle with are ones that have anticheat. And EasyAntiCheat is going linux friendly so something like 95 of the top 100 games on steam will either work natively or via proton.
And with Valve pushing the SteamDeck is see that number going to 100 soon.
Steam on linux will automatically pull in protondb profiles for your games, so you probably don't even need to explicitly "check out" protondb at this point. Most games will "just work", with the exception of big AAA games with picky anti-cheat engines.
Haven't you heard? It's the year of the Linux desktop :)
In all seriousness, until about a year ago when I got a discount on a Macbook and changed to that, I had been running Linux for about a decade across different laptops, and feel that since ~2017 the desktop experience has improved substantially. I bought a new laptop in 2017, installed Ubuntu on it...and that was it. I spent exactly zero minutes installing drivers or mucking with configurations, multiple monitors with HDMI audio worked out of the box, and "going to sleep upon the lid closing" just worked. Granted, I'm a bit of a Linux veteran at this so maybe there were a lot of things I was tweaking that I just don't remember since I do them so often, but I do not think that was the case, since I got my wife (who is not a software engineer) using Ubuntu as well for awhile.
I think part of what made it better was using AMD hardware for everything. The drivers are just included with the kernel, and they work great out of the box, at least for me.
I realize that telling everyone to shop for a computer based on the drivers that will be available isn't exactly a great sales pitch for Linux for the average consumer, but I suspect if you frequent HN you probably have a reasonable ability to differentiate video cards and whatnot.
> and "going to sleep upon the lid closing" just worked.
And "not going to sleep upon the lid closing" just works, too! I tried this when I hooked my laptop up to the TV. Closing the lid did nothing. It only went to sleep when you closed it and unplugged the HDMI. I really really liked that, despite it being a tiny detail.
I can't really blame people for thinking that the Linux desktop experience sucks, to be fair. As someone who used it in 2012 and went through the pain of getting an Optimus graphics card working correctly, and dealt with the weird rendering issues of Gnome 3, and had to write a bootup script to disable "tap to click" on my mousepad, it's a reasonable complaint to say that the Linux desktop is unfriendly.
I think a lot of people would genuinely like the 2021 Linux desktop experience if they tried it, but I fear that it will be quite difficult to shake the (well earned) stigma.
> I can't really blame people for thinking that the Linux desktop experience sucks, to be fair.
Nor me. A lot of it has been small things in my experience though, like this trackpad being terrible, or GNOME crashing once in a blue moon. I've definitely not experienced the level of pain you had with Optimus, or the rendering issues, which seems like a good thing. Although... on the subject of rendering issues, Firefox doesn't like it when the system is woken from sleep and has a really weird glitching effect until you maximise and restore the window.
On this laptop Linux hasn't been that bad, honestly the worst thing for me is this genuinely bad trackpad driver that has massive jutter and is hilariously broken. I might learn C so I can look into making my own.
I do agree on your last point(s). It's got substantially better, but as always there are little things that majorly hold it back (trackpad!) when the rest of the system isn't actually that bad. I'd much prefer it to Windows, despite its flaws.
Actually, outside of having trouble disabling tap to click, I haven't had a ton of issues with the trackpad.
I also haven't had the Firefox rendering problems, but I think that might be because for the last Linux laptop I had, I specifically sought out a graphics card that was likely to not have any issues.
> I might learn C so I can look into making my own.
I've thought about that too. If I weren't on Apple now I probably would have already started on that, but the closest thing I've done to any kind of "driver" has been to make custom FUSE mount.
> Actually, outside of having trouble disabling tap to click, I haven't had a ton of issues with the trackpad.
Ahh, interesting! Not sure why, but it seems that some people have a horrible experience with the trackpad on Linux, while others have a great time (from a quick observation, anyway).
As a dumb guess, maybe it's due to different drivers being used? It's exactly the same on Wayland and Linux, so I'm guessing it's happening a lot lower in the stack (I read something about libinput? Not sure where that lies at the moment.)
Grr, so much to think about! Perhaps one day I'll have a much better trackpad...
> I also haven't had the Firefox rendering problems, but I think that might be because for the last Linux laptop I had, I specifically sought out a graphics card that was likely to not have any issues.
Ahh, what graphics card is that? I'm guessing it's not NVIDIA.
I’m using an AMD system as an OBS Studio streaming system, and Linux was not great.
I first set it up with a Ryzen 5 3600 and Radeon HD 6750, running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, because I thought I didn’t really need that much processing power. After un-blacklisting the driver for such an old GPU, I discovered I was using upwards of 80% CPU and dropping frames while streaming at 1440p, so I decided to upgrade.
Then, I tried a Ryzen 7 5700g with integrated Vega 8. First, I needed to upgrade to Ubuntu 21.10 for such a new GPU, and then OBS Studio was randomly crashing while switching between scenes. Also, hardware video encoding wasn’t working well, so it was still taking upwards of 80% CPU while streaming at 1440p. And the video outputs were finicky, sending windows to the wrong screen on power up. Random crashing is unusable, so I switched to Windows.
With Windows 11 on the Ryzen 7 5700g, the hardware video encoding works well, so the same scenes are taking less than 50% CPU while streaming at 4K (2160p) and not dropping any frames. Now I can do other things on the stream.
I’m sorry you went through all that. I’m not going to ask you to switch back to Linux, but it might be worth filing a bug report with Ubuntu about this, since I doubt you are the only person who wants to use a Linux computer to stream video.
I used OBS when I was on Linux and it worked exactly as I wanted it to, but I’ll concede that I 1) wasn’t gaming and b) was using software encoding.
I'll typically do a minimal starting distro and lots of tuning, which works decently I think in the desktop world. But whenever I tried to apply this to a Laptop it would fail miserably, I think because my various static configurations don't work great for typical laptop use cases.
Boring old Ubuntu with some DE customization works totally fine on a laptop, though. I don't know why I tried to do this hard-mode for years.
Yeah, I used to run a vanilla Arch install on my laptop, and I did manage to get it working almost as well as Windows or macOS after about a week of tinkering, but after a certain point I realized that I want to work on cooler problems than mucking with systemd or dkms, so I just installed Ubuntu and never looked back until I bought a Macbook last year.
I think the newest versions of Ubuntu are great. They've started to give me everything I like about macOS [1] while being FOSS(ish) and portable to any computer I want.
[1] Not comparing Ubuntu to macOS directly, but more of a macOS "feel" in the sense of how I use it.
One problem here is that you always get posts like this. I've seen discussions about Linux on desktop going back twenty years, now, and there are always people saying it was problematic a few years ago and is so much better now. But then always plenty of people still having trouble and plenty of listed in-thread issues with sleep, trackpads, multi-monitor, configuration, compatibility, etc. It seems like you have to get lucky or do a lot of research. Or both.
Windows is always getting worse, too, but still basically works on all hardware. I've been thinking of switching away, given how bad Windows 11 looks to be and how irritating Windows 10 has been. But then, Windows XP, Vista and others were also known to be terrible but still mostly worked.
On balance, I'd say that Windows is likely to continue a user-hostile decline but still mostly work and Linux on Desktop is likely to always have a lot of effort involved if you want everything to work well. But there's probably no point at which Linux will work well on all hardware or Windows will be less usable by default.
> It seems like you have to get lucky or do a lot of research. Or both.
Yep, no question here. While Linux compatibility has gotten a lot better in recent years, you're definitely rolling the dice a bit in driver-land if you don't research beforehand.
That said, since pretty much every big distro is free, it's not necessarily a bad idea to just download it and try it out, at least with a Live USB Ubuntu image or something. If it works out of the box, then maybe you should install it, and if it doesn't, just unplug the flash drive and restart the computer and stick with Windows. It's entirely possible (and even likely these days) that it will Just Work (tm), and that might influence your decision in switching.
> But there's probably no point at which Linux will work well on all hardware
Yes and no; I think Linux tends to do exceptionally well on older hardware. I've been able to breath life into decade-old computers by just installing Linux Mint with MATE desktop [1], and generally by the time a computer is designated as "old", drivers on Linux are often better than they are on Windows, and due to how stupidly customizable Linux has become, you can get extremely lightweight desktops that require basically nothing to run (e.g. LXDE, MATE).
On newer hardware? Eh, as I said, you're rolling the dice a bit. Generally if you stick with AMD hardware, you are fine, as I said, but that's by no means guaranteed, and to me getting WiFi to work out of the box is the scariest thing, since if you cannot get connected to the internet, it's difficult to fix any of the problems.
[1] I did this for my grandmother who is still running an old AMD64 single-core computer. All she uses it for is browsing the web and checking email (not even YouTube) and she refuses to buy a new computer. Linux Mint has been a godsend.
> Something continuously does not work: multiple screens, waking up from sleep etc.
That's my experience with Windows as well though. On Dell xps on windows my external monitor goes blank sometimes and sleep randomly causes overheating and fast battery drain. On the other hand Linux handles it just fine. Win is not consistently better anymore.
I’ll add that m1 macs have been a shit show for external monitor support (ymmv but google it and you’ll find thousand page long support issues).
It’s either rocket science to get monitors to work flawlessly or it’s the B team working on it. Probably the former given that it’s also a problem on Linux and windoze.
I've been running Arch on my 8th (or maybe 7th?) Generation ThinkPad X1C since I bought it in 2018. I've had no issues with multiple monitors, hibernate, etc. I never got the fingerprint reader working but I don't care to use it regardless, so... Otherwise, though, it's been completely solid the entire time I've had it and it's my daily driver for personal project work.
Yes the ride you get on a laptop completely depends on the laptop. I have a Dell XPS and everything is working great under Linux with that, except sleep that Intel seem to have screwed with to keep the cpu awake. Other HP laptops have been either a similar ride for higher-end one or quite difficult to get working well for a cheap one.
Part of it is the laptops are developed for windows ACPI interpreter, for windows wifi drivers, for windows system level hack drivers etc. It takes time for Linux to figure out individual workarounds. At least for XPS Dell seem to be developing also for it to work on Linux.
I'll concede that if you're talking about the trackpad, Linux is disappointingly bad compared to Windows. It's really really shaky, scrolls up and down with a shockingly massive jitter. You start to wonder if the trackpad itself is malfunctioning. Sadly, the same trackpad works so much better on Windows.
This is mainly about the pointer / trackpad drivers to be fair, but it's still a freestanding issue that has the potential to really bug someone using Linux on a laptop. It gets so bad I have to carry around a mouse.
No shit! My laptop is a nearly 9 year old Dell Latitude. Haven't tried the ASUS trackpads, but IIRC it was quite smooth on an old Windows 8 netbook I had. Really miss that thing.
To clarify the parent's comment, he clicks a button in a menu to suspend, he just also said what the button is doing. It's probably less complicated than you're thinking.
On the other hand, some of it sticks. For one thing, gaming on Linux has improved by leaps and bounds approximately since the announcement of Windows 10.
Gaming on Linux gave up on trying to build native ports and Valve put some real effort into making their Windows compatibility layer that sits on Linux good.
Realize the people who complain how hard it is are the people who are stuck. The people who don't made it out aren't complaining. Get out takes effort, but also it depends on how you approach it. If you look at trying to leave as in "how to run what I have now without Windows OS," you're going to have a bad time. Instead, I would suggest a few approaches that make a transition a lot easier:
_Look at it as opportunity_
Other platforms have other ideas about how things should work. Instead of trying to replace Windows, take the time to realize that it's not the only way to solve problems. The Unix world has a pretty different idea about what's the way to work, which is often foreign until you realize there is a method to the madness. If you want opinionated and guided, MacOS is designed to have very strong "you won't have to worry about that" goal. Linux is the opposite and very flexible. So, you'll want to look at a lot of different distributions, as they all have particular goals in mind.
_Reconsider your current software_
Look at your current software and see if you can find replacements that are cross platform. This can mean software that runs on multiple platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, etc). This can also mean switching to cloud/self-hosted software. The software I use I choose through the lens of "if I have to give up my current platform of choice, does this go with me?"
_Sync your environment_
It can be daunting to jump ship to another OS if all your stuff is stuck on a different machine. I highly suggest SyncThing. It is a multi-platform, self-hosted synchronizer. Get a new machine (Linux, Mac) and sync your important files from your other machine. Now, you try out working on the new machine without loosing your work. Install some tools. Try getting stuff done. When you feel you've been held up for too long and need to get some stuff done again in Windows, all your stuff is magically sync'ed. Eventually, you'll find you're doing most of your work on the new machine, and you'll decide what to decommission from the old one.
_VM/Wine/Proton_
Windows support under Mac and Linux has come a long way. Maybe you still need a very specific piece of software. That's fine, just plan on taking time to figure out if you can still get it to work on your new platform.
About 12 years go I jumped from Windows to Mac and about 4 years ago I started working with Linux, as well. And, so can you. Today is your first day to start making changes.
Office365 being web/cloud based is a big difference this time.
A normal office worker wouldn't have much difference whether their desktop is Windows, Linux, Chromebook, etc.
Office workers follow breadcrumb trails through tech. As long as somebody gives them a document explaining how to follow the breadcrumbs, they don't care about anything else.
Then why wait? Programs like Photoshop and Ableton Live work just fine through WINE. I have a hard time imagining what kind of software you can't replace on modern Linux...
Even LabView runs natively on Linux now, so my reason for the last fifteen years may draw to a close soon. Microsoft decided to put Office in the cloud, so don't need Windows for that anymore... VMware is also quite good if WINE isn't good enough for some reason.
There's some rare expensive equipment that doesn't have Linux support (I'm talking $100k mechanical testing equipment and CNC machines) but those only need one computer each. Of course those probably won't support Windows 11 either, they barely supported Windows 10.
while these can be made to work .. Fusion360/SolidWorks/CATIA/Siemens NX are notoriously hard to make work, and when they do the fixes usually only last a single patch; and these softwares (aside from SolidWorks) are all always-connected and auto-updating.
and unfortunately a lot of that software is simply career-making.
It's simply an arms-race that can't be won from the consumer perspective without applying adequate pressure to the companies to try and facilitate a legitimate release.
it's hard to run any kind of business software to run any kind of business when it's in the back of your mind whether or not Autodesk has pushed an update to break everything by the time you need to use the software and have actual clients and money waiting for the work.
I'd drop all my windows machines in a heart beat if those companies would consider the GNU/Linux market, but i'm not really holding my breath -- they make a ton of money on their captive audience.
You're not necessarily wrong, but the vast majority of recent WINE developments have been going into making it a much more stable experience. The past decade of WINE development has pretty much been about throwing the kitchen sink at your program and praying that it works, but companies like Valve have made some pretty wild overhauls to the system that allow for both leaner and more predictable prefixes. It's still not perfect (and as you've suggested, will likely never be), but the gap is definitely closing. We've gotten to the point where people are confident shipping Linux consoles because the Windows compatibility layer is just that good. Game studios are able to support Linux-based platforms without targeting a build for the OS in the first place. As the technology continues to be refined, I can definitely see some CAD and studio software developers experimenting with the tech.
Much like you, I'm pretty pessimistic about the whole thing. It's safe to assume that nobody cares about it, but it's also still too early to say for sure. In 5 years, WINE could well be a stable development platform for third-party developers who want to focus on a Windows build but also offer compatibility with other operating systems. Stranger things have happened.
It would take a lot of progress for me to bet my livelihood on WINE functionality for niche software (whose customer support I pay for, and whose support agents would hang up on me the moment it became clear I was having trouble while not running on Windows).
These are my problem. Situations where "maybe the export is a little wrong because an update mucked with the optimal Wine configuration" don't fly when I'm about to bet the business (or a less extreme version, drop multiple yearly salaries) on a production run of some hardware.
> Programs like Photoshop and Ableton Live work just fine through WINE.
Could you expand on this, please? What was your experience working with Photoshop in WINE? What version / CC of Photoshop did you use? Did you use PlayOnLinux, which supports this IIRC?
Photoshop CS6 works pretty reliably on the majority of setups, I remember having an... ahem, perfectly legal copy installed without needing to use any install helpers whatsoever. WINE just downloaded all of the dependencies before launching the installer and it worked like a charm. According to WineHQ[0], the only features it seems to be missing is the updater that came with it. Creative Cloud seems to be a bit more hit-or-miss, but I genuinely don't know many people running CC these days. It might be worth doing your own research there.
Ableton Live 10 works fine though, I played around with it for a while before switching to Bitwig (which has a native Linux build), and I really didn't have any complaints besides the CPU usage being marginally higher than native Windows. I haven't tried it recently either, so the situation may well have improved.
EDIT: just reinstalled my copy of Live 11, it works out-of-the-box with WINE installed and no configuration.
I can't go around making claims that it's perfect, but it's pretty damn close. You may as well see for yourself, all the software (WINE, Linux, etc) is free.
Does low latency audio work through WINE? I don't care about the specific tech used, as long as midi->hearing audio works well enough to actually play a piano.
Depends on what you consider low, Live reported that it was around 45ms of latency using the default settings on the DirectAudio driver, I didn't bother to install ASIO4ALL and try it that way though. You could also bring it down by reducing the buffer size, but I didn't really mess with that either. Native DAWs can hit 5-10ms of latency though, I'd bet with a minimal amount of tinkering you could get it to hover around 15ms through WINE.
VSTs using iLok barely work on Windows/MacOS, I'd imagine their chances of working on Linux to be fairly slim, courtesy of the fact that the DRM is often larger than the plugin itself. Some manufacturers like U-HE have taken it upon themselves to start releasing Linux builds of their VSTs (albeit without support) and they seem to work really well from what I've tried.
So yeah, DRM is still an issue but the tides may be turning, especially now that the audio subsystem on Linux just got a massive rework.
That has been my thinking as well. I officially migrated from my Windows PC and my MacBook Pro to Linux (Pop!_OS on a Framework laptop) this year. Both companies have been slowly showing signs that their values are drifting away from things I care about (ownership, control, privacy). I'm willing to budge a little to accommodate alternate viewpoints, but it's been clear that they've picked a direction and their tanks will just keep crushing each of the lines in the sand.
I have Pop!_OS on a Framework laptop as well and if it wasn't a project laptop meant entirely for the purpose of being a project laptop and test bed for a few things I would chuck it out the window. In the reality of actually using the computer every single thing about my 5 year old MacBook Pro (the one everyone loves to hate) is better except maybe the keyboard, and that's not as cut and dry as the internet would pretend.
Everything works except everything that doesn't work well. Fractional scaling is a mess, integer scaling is not much better. YouTube on Firefox can barely play 1080p videos. Scrolling is anything but smooth, and the system doesn't appear to be doing much drawing on the GPU at all. When connected to an external 4k monitor running at 1.5x scale (how I use it with Windows and macOS) the system gets really slow.
Wayland is better performance wise, but at 1.5x scale (the best overall balance for the screen size and resolution) all electron based apps, which rely on xwayland, are blurry, and these days that's a lot of apps (including Slack, VS Code, and Zettlr which I run on all my systems). Kernel and driver support is mostly there except for the frequent regressions, so some features will in one version will break on the next kernel version, but it's fixed in the next next version, and that is not good enough. Power consumption on use is decent, but battery drain on sleep is atrocious even if you enable "deep sleep" which makes the machine take 5+ seconds to wake up.
Meanwhile Gnome insists on hiding as many settings from you as possible, so to set up CalDav contact syncing, which is managed by Gnome, I had to install an additional email app I won't use because the Gnome account manager doesn't bother to expose a UI to manage the account directly. And if I screw up the settings in the mail client Geary, which otherwise works well and is what I use, I have to delete the account and start over because there's no UI I can find to view and edit the server settings. It's completely ridiculous.
So the Pop!_OS team has built a really nice looking UI and a pretty good overall user experience (best I've had on Linux over the years), but it's all on top of a big pile of half working garbage. So it's simultaneously a really nice UI compared to my Windows 10 machine while being entirely frustrating to use.
I beg you to give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE, in the form of Gecko Linux Rolling, a try for a much more polished experience.
Tumbleweed, like Arch, is a rolling release so unlike the Debian based distros you'll always have the latest drivers and updates (development progress on Linux moves fast so why be stuck on outdated packages? I really can't in good conscience recommend PC users Debian/Ubuntu distros for a great experience), but unlike Arch, it's without sacrificing stability since its packages are tested so it's much less likely that an update will break something.
The developer of Gecko Linux Rolling, takes Tumbleweed and makes it desktop friendly by including non-OSS repos, non-OSS fonts, and non-OSS codecs plus other tweaks and creature comforts that turn make it easier to have a pleasant experience after the installation.
Trackpad is still not as polished as Windows or Mac but that's universal on Linux except Elementary OS.
Calling 10 "good" is a stretch. I'd still be using 7 if it wasn't for security updates. The snip tool and multiple desktops are the only things I use, and in exchange I have a truckload of stuff I have to disable to even make my OS usable, a useless search function and obscured menus, absolutely not worth it.
I have no hope of win12 being anywhere near good and will probably switch to about anything else.
Not so clear. Windows 8 with OpenShell installed is basically the same user experience as Windows 7; you can basically act like Metro never existed.
Windows 10 doubled down on Metro and much of the core functionality isn't available in the old control panel anymore. Even with OpenShell, it's a lot more janky than 8 is.
10 is also quite bad. It adds very little useful over Win7, while making several built-in programs worse and infecting the whole thing with spying and ads.
I've run all of them over the years (progressively upgrading like a good computer user). It's not even subtle. The good / bad dynamic is drastic.
And each 'bad' always brings to it a horrible UI change. Vista brought the window manager and those weird transparent windows and was generally ugly and buggy. Win 7 cleaned up the UI and made it flatter and simpler.
8 brought a full-screen start menu (!!). 10 went back to a 7-esque vibe (mostly).
Can you name what made the "good" releases good? Because when I look at the list, I can name bad things for every single "good" release that I disliked. Much of what makes a "good" release though, isn't that MS fixes anything from the "bad" release they just reskin a later service pack from the "bad" release and try not to break to many things. If you skip the "bad" releases it makes the "good" ones bad.
2000->XP, forced online activation, if you moved from ME->XP they finally broke a lot of dos era apps. That isn't to say that XP is that far from 2000 which IMHO remains the best windows MS ever released (particularly after SP3). The only significant thing of value MS has added since XP, is 64-bit support, and that is questionable if you consider there was a 64-bit XP.
vista->7, this one is harder, maybe the biggest ding is, that this is where they started to remove all the classic mode UI paradigms that were in place for 15+ years. So, while vista was such a mess that going from XP->7 was a shock, even on a PC 2x+ faster the UI still lags because much of the win32 graphics stack and sound system is now emulated on the processor rather than handed off to the graphics card driver.
Win8->win 10, even more ad's, forced updates, can't permanently disable the virus scanner that eats 50%+ of the disk IOP rate, the list here is endless.
In the case of 10-11, I don't think anyone would really have cared if they hadn't decided to screw with the start menu/task bar again. That is the one thing that raises the ire of windows users, yet they seem to always screw with it. I think secure boot/etc is less of an issue for people than it was 15 years ago (and IIRC someone already has a workaround).
I think what makes the "good" releases good is that they drastically pull back on the so-called "innovation" in each.
Vista tried a lot of new stuff, most of it was meh, then 7 came along and reined it in a lot, then we got 8/8.1, again, changing a ton of stuff unnecessarily in the name of updates, then 10 tried to strike a middle ground. Now we have 11, with its exceedingly aggressive hardware requirements and forced changes. With 12 we'll probably be back to MS trying to compromise so people move on from 10.
I think MS's issue with OS planning is that they really don't understand "don't fix it if it isn't broken", after every successful Windows version they get overly ambitious, change too much and push users away. Then for the following release they have to consider the fact that a large portion of their userbase hasn't upgraded, so they actually pay attention to feedback and try to compromise between what people want and what MS wants.
Heh, exactly. I bought an amazing all-AMD laptop this summer and its 2TB SSD and 32GB RAM still lie on my desk right next to it. I'll get to opening it up and upgrading it and then will proceed to try and make it my main machine with Linux, including for light AAA gaming and main gaming machine for everything that's not AAA -- console emulators, MAME / arcade emulators, Steam Proton, you name it.
(Well, for programming too of course but a 6c / 12t mobile CPU might not be good enough for a main dev machine. We'll see.)
So yep, my sentiment is exactly like yours. I'll start slowly but seriously work towards ridding myself of Windows forever. It has been on a downward spiral for far too long to ignore anymore.
Linux is not all sunshine and rainbows either but at this point I am willing to take the plunge and create my own Frankenstein monster of scripts and workarounds so that it can work perfectly for me. Plus, if more people start doing it, desktop Linux will eventually improve (lol; but who knows?).
If you setup a VM with WSUS, you can use that to setup an ideal install that is missing the annoying updates. If you capture an image right after doing that, you'll never need to install again.
What makes you think that, say, the Edge link issue will be solved in Windows 12? It looks like Microsoft has run out of ideas and does not have enough innovation to genuinely offer anything interesting in an operating system. Besides, an OS has become a commodity, something you expect to just work, not to be excited about like in the old days of Windows 95 when people literally queued to buy their copy.
I mean, they could get rid of legacy designs (e.g., control panel and screen saver windows), but instead, they've focused on offering yet another design layer on top of the previous ones, which has much overlap in functionality with the previous design (e.g., you could control your bluetooth both in Control Panel and in the new settings app). You'd think MS would be able to unify all this mess and consolidate Windows settings, but no.
> You'd think MS would be able to unify all this mess and consolidate Windows settings, but no.
Removing or redesigning the Control Panel would break third-party apps that rely on the existing structure; Raymond Chen's blog[0] has mentioned apps doing this.
Do you think that the OS is dead, or almost dead? That would lead to decades of stagnation, followed by a race to the bottom. If that's true Windows should become a dumpster fire. And the linux desktop will solve everything, just decades too late.
I'm far from saying the OS is dead: it is a necessary component of all modern devices. The point is, it's a commodity now. Apple doesn't charge for it. Linux distributors don't charge for it. Google doesn't charge users for it. And Microsoft not only charges for it, but introduces a ton of adware, telemetry and so forth. For technically-conscious users, it's suboptimal.
I don't believe in a sudden revolutionary change. Linux and macOS do increase their presence on the desktop, but the curve is almost flat, so it will take decades to even break even. Nevertheless, the trend exists, and Microsoft would have to do something very unusual to reverse it.
For me personally this is very important because the PC is one of the last open computing platforms.
So the idea that developing a good desktop makes money is dead? If so, since no further improvements in windows will help MS make loads more money, they may as well set it on fire (i'm just speculating where the current trend might lead. I don't think MS execs have yet made a full decision on commiting arson, but they aren't against the idea), since it can burn for a long time and keep them warm throughout.
Don't let the "security" FUD scare you. I bet 99% of malware infections are from people running stuff they should know better than to. Turn off all listening services, use a firewall, and keep JS off by default. I can't wait to see how many new exploits are introduced by all the new features of Win11 which are in a seemingly half-done state... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28404332
After several years of "essential security updates" being unconditionally bundled with hostile, anti-user changes in both the desktop and mobile space, it is no surprise that some of us will start to assume that the security updates are not actually so essential.
With software from github or f-droid, I look forward to updates and check frequently, because I trust the developers to make good software and I can revert if necessary. With software from microsoft or google, I dread updates and disable them, because I trust the developers to make bad software with no practical means of reverting.
I wonder if people could sue Microsoft into offering security updates past that date, on the basis that MS did some big marketing about calling Win10 the "last" windows version.
Didn’t you know? “GPU scheduling” is a change that makes the Windows driver behave more like Linux ones. There’s nothing to implement, it’s been done that way the whole time.
edit That’s only if you use mesa, though. Nobody has a clue what the nvidia binary driver is up to.
I wasn't talking about hardware GPU scheduling, that allows sending compute work to GPU using GPU features. I was talking the kind of scheduling, that prioritizes one kind of work over another as in CPU scheduling (e.g. process priorities). Linux does not do that for GPU AFAIK.
I left Windows desktop for Linux two years ago, and what I realize now that took a while to happen was a shift in mentality:
- When you use Windows, you consume the OS. Everything about it is given, all you do is take.
- When you use Linux, you take part in a give-and-take relationship with the OS, because the OS is attached to a community that works on it, around it.
Using Linux means that you're not going to have everything given to you on a silver plate. But you also get to make your own silver plate and pass it around.
Probably we have very different use cases. I use my laptop to browse, edit documents, develop programs and transfer/view media files. In all these I'd very much like to not even know I have an operating system. So the major difference is I'm not using the laptop to have relationships, with it or with some community, and the less I need to fiddle outside the above use cases, the more I appreciate the experience.
It sounds to me like GP wants to stay on Windows 10. I agree Linux is better, but if you want that, you can move to it whenever you want completely independent of Windows 11.
Pelle wants all kinds of stuff that is bad for them. Sometimes the right thing to do is to push them to change for the better.
Microsoft treats their users with contempt. And I understand it because no matter the privacy or software abuse, they keep using it.
Same reason people continue to use Facebook - they just don't have the spine to change their behavior and become better people who don't use shitty products.
Considering the state of security in modern computing devices and the various OS's that power them, security updates mean less and less to me over time. Nothing is secure and likely won't ever be. I'd argue we're collectively less secure in 2021 than in 1995 despite massive advances in all other areas of the field.
Adding features probably increases the number of bugs, but security updates generally reduce the number of (exploitable) bugs. So I think that not taking security updates is throwing the baby away with the bathwater; stay on Win10 as long as you like, but apply the security updates.
You can actually block feature updates and still allow security updates on Windows 10 through GPO (Win + R, gpedit.msc). Pretty cool and somewhat little-known feature.
I've been using Win11 now for about a week (so take this with a grain of salt) and one positive I've noticed has been a far better UX. OSX has made a ton of leaps and bounds for optimizing controls for how you use your computer, and it felt like windows 10 was lagging behind quite a bit in the last year. Windows 11 addressed a lot of these grievances.
Browser overrides like this are definitely in the negative UX column, but better bluetooth controls, a new consolidated settings panel, and smoother window management are all positives for me. FWIW I haven't hit a situation where I've been forced into edge (yet).
It's not "a setting" but an obscure registry entry. And have you actually tried it? I did and it's a joke - you get the taskbar there but no icons on it lol. And how about drag and drop? Or grouping?
I can't comment about other people but to me the reply felt like denying my personal experience of those three frustrations (because yes I am frustrated with W11) of which two seemed ignored and one presented with a solution which I already tried to no avail. If you had acknowledged the other two in the initial answer (like in a "at least for position..."), I'm very sure I wouldn't have reacted. Small things can make or break...
Now the aside being put aside, I have no idea why you have a setting and I don't, as I'm on the latest updates. Could be that Microsoft is doing some A/B testing? And is the left positioned taskbar working fine for you? I still won't switch until at least drag&drop comes back but it would be a glimmer of hope.
Theres left alignment and then theres left position (left side of display rather simply left aligned but still on the bottom). On my Win 11 machine you can only position the bar on the bottom, and no setting is offered to change it other than icon alignment.
Ah, yes. If you want it running vertically on the left or right, or horizontally across the top, there is no setting for that. There are some registry settings documented by third parties, but I haven't tried them.
UX Things I've liked about this upgrade cycle on my desktop setup:
- More snap zones and ways to trigger snap
- Snap zones can be pulled up or switched to as a group
- More things moved in the Settings app
- Settings app is now uses a more traditional left pane navigation instead of a list of large boxes for touch
- Window layouts better remember and adapt to monitor changes (such as unplugging from an TV)
- AutoHDR
- Separate wallpapers to different virtual desktops (makes remembering where you are easier)
- Defaults to the new Windows Terminal
Some of the other changes (mica, new start menu, new context menu, rounded window look, new themes, taskbar tray area changes, variable Segoe UI, new Store, widgets) I'd call a wash. They are there and changed but overall I can't say any have been particularly noticeable or helpful like the above items.
The new context menu should improve things over time since it forces IExplorerCommand usage, which only allows in-process command logic so there should be no more UI hangs when someone has 20+ context menu entries (even if the command options end up lazy-loading in).
> Settings app is now uses a more traditional left pane navigation instead of a list of large boxes for touch
Serious question: why didn't they just do this in the first place? It can't be hard to check if the user has a touch input and dynamically resize buttons / list items, then size them back down when the user is done. They do exactly this for "Tablet mode"[0] in Windows 10.
This, and the pitch black dark mode that honestly looks dreadful on non-OLED, makes me think they don't really take customisation into much consideration.
I can see minimizing changes to the interface across devices as being good but as to why they didn't do this compromise of larger navigation entries instead of full touch first I'm not sure but it would have saved so much grief. It might have had to do with Windows Phone still being a thing at the time.
Regarding dark theme the dark app background is 12.5% gray and the lighter offset backgrounds are 17.5% gray. If it appears pitch black it's not because the theme is made for OLEDs rather your displays are miscalibrated and completely crushing blacks. If you enable transparency effects the color of your background will blend with these and raise/lower them accordingly.
> Regarding dark theme the dark app background is 12.5% gray and the lighter offset backgrounds are 17.5% gray. If it appears pitch black it's not because the theme is made for OLEDs rather your displays are miscalibrated and completely crushing blacks.
Hmm, are you sure about this? From a quick search, I'm able to find plenty of people complaining about the dark background being pitch black[0] (there's also a Feedback Hub item linked in there, not able to open it as I'm on Linux). I might be wrong, but I am fairly sure my display is not mis-calibrated, as I actually spent a lot of time calibrating it when it got here (have only had it a handful of months). The only downside of the monitor is that blacks really smear when you move them around, whereas dark greys are substantially better.
That's one of the reasons I really dislike the pitch black mode, anyway. It also just looks horrible on anything that isn't AMOLED, IMO.
> If you enable transparency effects the color of your background will blend with these and raise/lower them accordingly.
That's only for surfaces with blur enabled though, like the sidebar in Settings or the taskbar. Non-blurred surfaces are pitch black.
As much as I'd like to be able to claim to be a color expert that can eyeball HSL values with enough certainty to give the answer in decimal percentages the above numbers are from color picker readings of a screenshot of my install.
> I'm able to find plenty of people complaining about the dark background being pitch black[0]
I can't speak about what was true 4 years ago in a preview build adding dark theme, or Windows 10 at all for that matter as I don't have a current install anymore, but for Windows 11 today the above are the measured values.
> That's only for surfaces with blur enabled though, like the sidebar in Settings or the taskbar. Non-blurred surfaces are pitch black.
For that particular preview version of 10 perhaps, in Windows 11 there is also a new opaque material called Mica used heavily throughout the interface as it has less of a performance hit (no blur/transparency) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/style/m...
It's not plastered in the default view anymore but I still see the "rewards" button if I navigate to the account section: https://i.imgur.com/IWBkaEJ.png
Ah that's dumb. One of the best things about wslg is pretty pedestrian, but very helpful. You can make Windows shortcuts to launch applications in a very easy way now.
Within the "Target:" setting, for a shortcut, just "wslg.exe /some/program -args". No wrappers, no setting DISPLAY, no calling /bin/sh -c "whatever", etc.
It will be the same reason you updated windows years ago: some driver or piece of software will only work in windows 11, and you will be forced to switch.
I have two machines: windows for gaming and work, Linux for everything else. My Linux machine is wonderful, sometimes even for gaming, but my windows machine won’t stop doing web searches via bing when I try to use the search bar, and won’t stop trying to swap my browser, and keeps reverting my privacy settings
The lack of any ability to move the task bar to the side of a screen is killing me on Win11. As an ADD person who has spent years training myself to glance to the right for notifications it's been really breaking my workflow by making it difficult to ignore various applications beeping and blooping.
I've ignored the prompt to update to Windows 11 for a couple weeks now. This morning it gave me just two options "no" or "now". There was no clear option to "remind me later". Maybe they just continue to nag you, but it wasn't clear to me as a user.
You can say that about the vast majority of upgrades that come with a new OS version if you isolate them. But at the end of the day, they are going to end up bundling a bunch of upgrades together to form a new OS version for a variety of reasons that usually aren't strictly technical.
I'm surprised you're asking this because it's quite optimistic. No, it's not possible. The best you can do is probably patching Win11 to somehow use Win10-ish UI features.
I'm going to say that it probably is... the question is whether anyone is motivated enough to do it. Microsoft's culture of back-compat is not only for third-party applications, so it shouldn't be surprising that e.g. various apps from an older version of Windows would run on a newer one. I use the XP calc.exe on Win10, for example.
The somewhat-underground far-East communities have made weird chimeras of different Windows versions. I've seen Windows XP explorer.exe running on a Windows 7 kernel. No idea how stable or usable that is, but it's been done before.
This is my first PC build, out of about 15-20 or so in the last 30 years going back to the 386sx16, that does not have an intel processor. I'm very happy with the price/performance of the 5950x.
Eventually, AMD's architecture is going to change and the OS will need a shift with it.
Intel just had a major change between gen11 and gen12, so its the most obvious technical reason that warrants an update. But AMD Zen4 (or whatever happens for Zen5) could also need a similar scheduler update... or if not, maybe some other I/O change.
-----------
If your hardware never changes, you can keep using the OS from years and years ago.
But as hardware details change, it only makes sense to update the OS with the hardware. Just as Linux 5.x has all sorts of updates over Linux 4 or Linux 3, so too does Windows need to change to keep up with the pace of hardware changes.
Windows 11 is just another Microsoft operating system setting the groundwork for a generational leap just like Windows ME, Windows Vista, and Windows 8. IMO it is designed to not be widely adopted.
When Windows ME was released, it was little more than a reskin of Windows 98 that removed or disabled much of the 16 bit capabilities and support for the ISA architecture in favor of 32 bit and PCI. It couldn't be installed on most existing machines and was highly unstable on those that it would run on.
Windows Vista wasn't much different. It was a crappy skin and a new desktop composition paradigm requiring better underlying graphics hardware than Intel was providing at the time. Many systems couldn't upgrade to it and those that did had stability issues due to immature graphics drivers.
Windows 8 was similar, it introduced a newer kernel design that fully extracted Win32 out to userland. It also introduced Metro and other modern elements that weren't bound to IA32/IA64. It was primarily targeted at modern single screen touch enabled devices and didn't work well as an upgrade or on desktop PCs. They eventually shipped Windows 8.1 which was largely a refinement of 8 that was arguably the test bed for extending Windows 8 concepts to the desktop.
When Windows ME was released, it was little more than a reskin of Windows 98 that removed or disabled much of the 16 bit capabilities and support for the ISA architecture in favor of 32 bit and PCI. It couldn't be installed on most existing machines and was highly unstable on those that it would run on.
Very little of this is true. Windows ME runs all the 16-bit code you can throw at it and supports all ISA devices identically to 95 and 98. Windows 9x were just as 32-bit as ME and supported PCI just fine.
The only thing they removed support for was booting into real-mode DOS, and started ignoring your autoexec.bat and config.sys files for the most part. You can hack that back into the OS pretty trivially, it's purely cosmetic and has nothing to do with the underlying architecture. They probably did this in an attempt to hide its creaky MS-DOS roots, and to get customers more used to not being able to run pure DOS before the inevitable shift to NT.
Windows ME was a product even Microsoft seemingly didn't really want to make -- nothing but a last-minute stopgap measure until they got XP ready. No one liked it at the time as it was basically Windows 98 but worse. There are some good parts, though -- improved USB support, for instance -- and therefore there are now projects that "backport" features from Windows ME to Windows 98 so you can get the best of both worlds.
> Very little of this is true. Windows ME runs all the 16-bit code you can throw at it and supports all ISA devices identically to 95 and 98.
No it doesn't. Windows ME didn't just remove support for booting into real-mode. It removed support for VxD drivers.
In Windows 3 Microsoft introduced virtual device drivers (VxD) that allowed applications to share hardware, these VxD drivers actually just mediated access to a real-mode 16 bit driver. This allowed hardware manufacturers to write one driver to support MS-DOS and Windows.
In Windows 95 they allowed you to implement VxD with true protected-mode drivers that lacked backward compatibility but with much higher performance. This was supported right up through Windows 98SE. Technically though a manufacture only need to ship a real-mode VxD driver to support MS-DOS, Windows 3, and Windows 9x if they didn't need high performance benefits of a protected-mode driver.
The WDM driver model was introduced with Windows 98 and it simplified driver development but was only compatible with operating systems >= Windows 98. So apart from sound cards that benefited from the WDM driver model introduced in Windows 98, a vast array of hardware only supported real-mode VxD drivers.
There was actually an issue that plagued Windows 9x where if the OS detected an instability in a protected-mode VxD driver it would put a flag in the registry to permanently stop the OS from attempting to load protected-mode drivers and your system be stuck running real-mode drivers resulting in significant performance issues with IDE devices.
IIRCC Microsoft announced the drop of support for VxD in Windows ME like 2 months before it went Gold.
Because most modern hardware was PCI based and using WDM, this resulted in a lot of ISA/16-bit hardware just never getting ported to Windows ME and a lot of hastily written and inherently unstable WDM drivers for a few products that did.
This impacted a lot of folks, I remember Creative Labs having issues with WDM drivers on their sound cards for years.
I still don't understand how the hell they shipped the Metro Start screen on Windows Server 2012 and 2016. I hope somebody got fired for okaying that decision.
Metro Apps are not based on Win32 and you can have a GUI without installing Win32 at all as is the case with Windows 8 on ARM.
This significantly reduces your threat model at the cost of backward compatibility.
They developed the Metro Start screen specifically for Windows 8 ARM but shipped it across all OSes using that Kernel for consistency.
I think it was starting with Windows 8, all GUI server tools were just a UI running powershell underneath. So you could scrap Win32 and still have full control of the system.
I have 1 reason. ConPTY - it simply works better on Windows 11. VSCode actually respects mouse support under 11 w/ POSIX compliant terminals - but not under 10. That is it, and for RDP but 10 did equally well with RDP, except for the ConPTY support being broken.
So all in all the main reason I use 11 is for better mouse support in terminals that finally puts Windows on the same playing level as macOS or Linux for me. I still hate the OS, but at least it is usable after countless hours of doing other fixes.
Free update. Better Linux subsystem support, an android emulator better than anything on Linux, good performance, easy to bypass TPM, lots of software support (since it’s emulating Linux lol).
I say this as a Linux user who doesn’t use windows except for some Win only programs that VM and wine can’t run.
The most common reason i've heard has been: "Yeah, but it's so much more biutiful than Windows 10." But then again, this appears to work quite well for Microsoft.
Quite a bit of exaggeration here. Im using it for WSL and development. Much better than WSL on Win10 and the OS itself is definitely a nice UX update to Win 10
Indeed, I'm going to try holding out on Windows 10 until the next version. Win11 seems like another Vista or Windows 8 to me so far. I can't even run Win11 with my current hardware anyways for silly arbitrary reasons. I have an Intel Skylake CPU + need to boot over legacy BIOS due to a on-board RAID. Both work completely fine and my PC is still performant enough, but don't meet the requirements.
I mean, at some point they converge to the featureset of Windows 7, and then Microsoft has no business model anymore when it comes to stability and time-of-life; which was the previous reason industries chose Windows over alternatives.
Whether these are reasons for you I can't say, for me it's:
- proper support of dual monitor setups (particularly via Displayport) and remembering window positions
- WSL2 integration (it really does work great)
- eventual drop of Win 10 support
Not great:
- new taskbar is meh
- preferences are still all over the place
Yeah, I'm sure over the next few years there will be things that come out worth having, but especially while both are supported it is mostly a new coat of paint with a higher minimum system requirement.
Eventually we'll be there, but there's no incentive to get there right now.
Other than security updates, there hasn't been an enticing reason to update since XP. The fact that XP was still in use by so many people and orgs after it was officially no longer supported proves the point.
I upgraded to Win11 for supporting A2DP AAC codec. I'm fine with new explorer, angry for new taskbar and start menu. Nothing is improved for those but just degrade.
Firefox should go all the way on this. Exploit bugs, modify binaries, whatever it takes. With user consent of course. If the user says they want Firefox to be their default browser, Firefox is justified in modifying the operating system to achieve that. Ultimately Microsoft is powerless to stop this except by using their antivirus to block installation of Firefox in the first place, and I'd like to see them try that because the blowback would be epic.
Microsoft already warns you that Firefox might be malware and that edge is more secure sometimes. It’s only one step away from a full ban. Decades ago, they got the monopoly treatment for this stuff
It’s a very different world today than when Microsoft went through antitrust proceedings for IE6. Regulatory authorities worldwide are getting more toothless by the day. Heck Apple doesn’t even let you use alternate browsers or install your own apps and they are celebrated for it. On what basis would there be action against Microsoft now?
> Apple doesn’t even let you use alternate browsers
Are you sure that's true? When I was using my MacBook a year ago, I used Chrome with no problems. Set as default and never had to look at Safari again.
One of the points I've made against Microsoft doing this is not even control freak Apple goes this far.
Maybe but if they can go to court and say that Firefox is malware because it’s intentionally breaking OS security features they’ll probably get away with it.
It's sad to see them slipping back to such tactics, as they've made strides in changing their image in the last decade or so. I have to wonder if there was one particular good idea fairy there, and it pained the devs to have to code this "feature" in.
Blacklist all binaries in SmartScreen and Windows Defender, distribute a Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool that deletes it through Windows Update, revoke any Windows or Visual Studio licenses belonging to Mozilla Corp, they have a lot of options actually. But if they tried any of that, there would be consequences.
This. Just like in the ol' good days, install an API hook (e.g. with Microsoft Detours[1]) that would patch relevant functions in-memory. Microsoft cannot block this because they'll be breaking lots of existing things (automation tools, gaming overlays, AV software even).
And if MS would want to play it rough and start blocking hook DLLs with permission barriers, make this API patcher a kernel module.
I mean, people already install what are basically kernel level rootkits so they are able to play competitive multiplayer games. It is no stretch from what is accepted for Firefox to dig into the OS and stand its ground
Windows 11 was an absolute downgrade to my Windows 10 experience. To the point that I went back to windows 10 in less than a day of Windows 11.
1. I can't ungroup the taskbar windows. So now I have to hoover the taskbar to see multiple instances of the same software;
2. Who the hell thought it was a great idea to couple all the commands like WiFi, power energy, etc under the same menu? On Windows 11 I needed to click the WiFi icon, select WiFi menu, select a WiFi to connect to. Whereas on windows 10 I just click on the WiFi symbol and choose the WiFi. I don't like my computer auto connecting to the Internet so I manually connect whenever I want and use this menu multiple times a day.
3. Speaking of great ideas, now all the right click useful stuff is behind a second menu... Pure genius move.
I know I can hack my way around these issues but I don't see the point of installing sketchy software or messing registry hacks to fix this mess. I will use Windows 10 until its end of life.
It’s Windows Millennium Edition 2. Break things that worked fine, add things that add no value, recategorize everything to confound expert and novice users.
I use Windows (10) and MacOS and I like the Mac way better. How often do I need to click on the wifi and volume icons? Hardly ever. Might as well merge them into one menu.
Many people have multiple wifi with different devices, printers on each, have to do it multiple times a day. It's a problem with single menu. What is the problem having separate button that are useful to others?
Alpine is extremely popular for containers due to always picking lightweight choices like not using systemd. I don't think any of the Google distros (Android, Chrome OS) use it either but that shouldn't be particularly surprising. And of course hardcore classic Gentoo still lets you pick whether you want to or not. Void for a more traditional "user desktop" distro.
I like systemd and those are the only cases I remember being surprised the usual commands didn't work.
There's still a number of modern distros that drop it by default like Denuvan and Void. I don't particularly hate systemd, but I really disagree with it's design philosophy and general layout these days. It's not that hard to sympathize with the people who grew frustrated with it's lack of modularity and tossed it in lieu of a better init system.
I do just to try. Popular isn’t a good measure, window on desktop, Intel graphics and Facebook are popular. I like systemd but I wouldn’t mind trying other init.
Linux has various distros designed for specific professional domain (such as security, music, networking etc.). Windows doesn't have distros (unfortunately, it would be game changer if MS allowed for this) so you absolutely need to tweak it to your preference unless you use it only to for trivial stuff.
Honestly, if you're going to modify Windows, why not just go Linux? Monkeypatching Windows into a good (useable?) OS seems like more effort for less return than just picking up a distro. The only advantage I've heard people claim for Windows is that "it just works." If it can't even meet your workflow, why bother?
I like Windows. Any hardware just works. Many linux distros are nice but none I tried could handle the diversity of devices as Windows. To get some things done you even need to recompile the kernel, something unheard of in Windows land.
I customize the heck out of Windows with couple of PowerShell scripts. So to get my own "distribution" I need no more then hour or two wait and almost zero effort starting from default ISO install.
I usually have:
1. Recursive windows updater (handles updates and restarts until no updates are available)
If it's productive and you like it, then that's great! I stopped using Windows about 7 years ago; I've slowly radicalized myself to the point where I just genuinely hate Windows as a product and often wish toenail cancer upon its engineers.
I'm realizing how detrimental this is to my emotional well-being, but I still genuinely can not imagine what would entice me back to the Microsoft stranglehold. The fact that you even need to run a debloater (that removes most of the user-facing crud), add a package manager, and empathically tell your OS to shut up... I just don't see the point.
It's adversarial.
Why do I want an enemy for an OS? and even if the OS was friendly, Microsoft certainly isn't, and so: why do I want an enemy's snitch for an OS?
> The fact that you even need to run a debloater (that removes most of the user-facing crud), add a package manager, and empathically tell your OS to shut up... I just don't see the point.
I do this for almost anything. I was doing the same thing when I was actively using Ubuntu, Arch or MacOS as a daily driver. Only I can say what is the environment I work in and its by definition impossible for anybody else to get it right.
> Why do I want an enemy for an OS? and even if the OS was friendly, Microsoft certainly isn't, and so: why do I want an enemy's snitch for an OS?
Why are you skipping relevant bits to confirm your biases ? I was fighting all OSes all the time, I fight Windows only on initialization, and other OSes every freaking week. Why would I want that ?
You don't seem to have healthy thought process around big coorps - I don't work for them, and I don't care about ANY of them. When I switched from Windows to Linux it was because I couldn't see that direction where MS was going was good and OS sucked. I was happy with Linux and learned a lot, but I had frequently to do non-trivial job to get trivial things working (like USB). I returned to Windows few years later when they started their FOSS era, and I am now more than happy.
The truth is, I don't care for ANY OS. I don't care for their desktops, shiny init apps, stupid windows managers, control panels. Fuck all of that. Give me kernel, terminal and browser and let me be, I can take it from there. So basically any OS I use looks the same and uses the same x-platform tools.
I went from Win7 to LTSB, then upgraded to LTSC (for gpu passthrough) but still hated it for some reason, mainly needing to undo windows changes and various issues that should have been defaults. I went to KDE and use windows only for some Win software that didn’t work on VM or wine.
I miss Windows 2000 Pro, it wasn’t bloated, pretty fast, didn’t crash and had the fewest problems.
The key is to get or make a stripped down version of LTSC. Remove everything possible before you even install it. It's a lot like win2k but with more update nags.
That's the moment you fire up Firefox without prefetch nor studies and enjoy the peaceful DNS logs without the constant telemetry calls to LinkedIn and to all interested 3rd parties, five eyes etc
A few of them actually do make sense for a normal user (i.e. the Wifi portal stuff). But you can disable it if you spend some effort on it or you can also use an alternative build of Firefox without it. Not great, but also not terrible imo. Sorry, that I have no English source.
On linux you can use IceCat. On windows, download simplewall and block pingsender.exe there. Should get rid of the queries if you combine it with userjs tweaking.
> On windows, download simplewall and block pingsender.exe there
Even if that works, it'll likely get patched out eventually with a forced update.
If you do insist on using Windows, an external firewall is the only way to be sure. But even that isn't foolproof since another update may decide that your Windows license isn't valid unless the analytics server is reachable.
Just setup pihole - you can run it on any server and use it as a local dns server. Probably somebody else has done the work to list these spammy domains.
If you just want FF to not use it you can block "use-application-dns.net" which acts as a canary domain for it to disable DoH.
If you want to block it from things you don't trust to have such methods (or always listen to them) you'll have to upgrade to a firewall that can filter outbound connections to IPs the client hasn't received a DNS response for or require use of an explicit HTTP proxy for outbound connectivity.
Just blocking DNS can be a good middle ground for reasonable effectiveness without as much effort.
thank you for the tip!
I use an OpenWrt acces point that is on my desk and uses dnsblocking through blacklists. This way I have a wired and wifi network that block the most annoying stuff by default. It also integrates nicely with wireguard too.
It's more that Microsoft is a huge company that contains both benevolent and malevolent actors. The Windows team has embraced dark patterns wholeheartedly whereas the VSCode team is doing good work to earn developer love. That these goals are in complete opposition seems to not trouble MS execs.
It's not surprising that Microsoft's developer team is the one gathering goodwill, and it's not because they just happen to be staffed by good people. Microsoft bet against open source and lost, and they were watching themselves lose developer mindshare in real time with the rise of GitHub and open source languages/runtimes like Python, Node.js and Ruby, most of which run better and are easier to use (especially with native addons) in Linux and Unix (incl. macOS.) So suddenly you see VS Code, WSL, Windows Terminal, Azure, .NET Core, POSIX semantics in the Windows API, and so on, all aimed at keeping developers (but not end-users) running Windows on bare-metal, or at least using Microsoft cross-platform software in place of non-Microsoft cross-platform software.
On the other hand, Windows, which is absolutely dominant among end-users, is the one employing dark patterns because they know it isn't under threat. These aren't coincidences.
The VSCode team is busy releasing proprietary extensions which won't run on open source builds of Code, but only proprietary builds packaged by Microsoft.
I feel like Microsoft really has changed. Not the EEE portion though, it's just that quality and support of their products is no longer a serious consideration. We had to engage software assurance support recently and it is horrifically useless compared to the last time we did.
Microsoft is a very big company. Microsoft as a whole has changed, almost all divisions are playing much nicer than in the past. It seems like it's the windows division specificaally tha still plays by the old rules.
Pipewire has made all of my audio issues on Linux go away, at this point. Maybe it's my hardware (a high-end Dell Latitude that is Ubuntu certified) but it just f*cking works!
I'm on Arch, so I find I tend to have fewer issues than with Ubuntu (due to the latter always being on some ancient version). Seriously though when I switched from Pulse to Pipewire... I rebooted and I've never had any issues since!
Now, my biggest complaints are around i3 and X11. I get some flickering, and display management is a little painful. But those are largely self-imposed because of i3. I haven't tried switching to Wayland yet because it's good enough for me.
At this point, it's been years since I've used a Windows PC for work and... I'm so damn happy about it!
I actually contribute to PipeWire development in some small aspect (reporting bugs, debugging issues), and PipeWire is far from trouble-free. The recent 0.3.41 contained a bad commit which causes PulseAudio apps (RetroArch, QEMU, Orca) to infinitely buffer audio in xrun or something (fixed in git). And PipeWire has some issues switching profiles when you plug and unplug devices, and sometimes picks the wrong speaker/headphone port(?) when rebooting and then enabling a device, and the latency algorithm has issues as well (under default settings, it takes up to 0.6 seconds to hear certain libcanberra notification sounds). And it reuses IDs exposed to PulseAudio apps, which causes race conditions (eg. crashes, incorrect stream-to-app mappings in plasmashell) in PulseAudio apps. "Write" race conditions (eg. changing app volume) are unresolvable due to the Pulse protocol, though apps can be fixed to avoid "read" race conditions by ignoring stale data from IDs which have been deleted and recreated.
I still use PipeWire because routing app audio is cool (and not possible AFAIK on PulseAudio), and I can usually avoid the bugs well enough in practice. But it's not "just f*cking works" in many cases.
Switched to wayland today because nvidia drivers were killing performance when I plugged my 4k monitor into my laptop. Barely usable under X, fixed under wayland. Also wayland was able to independently scale the 4k monitor and the laptop monitor, which was nice. Found a couple niggles but so far what I need is working. (Using KDE.)
> Now, my biggest complaints are around i3 and X11. I get some flickering
I've started experiencing flickering in non-compositing window managers on Arch a few months ago (I mainly use Openbox, although I've tried dwm too) after some update. My solution was just to run `xcompmgr &` at the session startup.
If you're tired of waiting for next Ubuntu release and like living on the edge, you can switch to "Ubuntu+1", or always using the next release while it's being polished. Just replace "groovy" with the codename of your current Ubuntu release:
sudo sed -i 's/groovy/devel/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
wlsunset was a lot simpler for me to get to work compared to gammastep, which I thought had too steep a learning curve. I only need it for the yellow light, thought.
Frankly, sound has not been a problem for a long time now I think. Hell, the number of time windows killed the sound driver under usage for whatever reason it deemed useful, I actually would say nowadays Windows has the worst audio stack out of the 3 main OSs.
I always seem to have hardware that hits an edge case for Linux support.
Take my gpu's sound support. If I run sound through DisplayPort it runs 40% slower and an octave an a half lower pitch. Over HDMI it runs fine. Oddly, if I have an HDMI device attached sound over DisplayPort runs fine, until the HDMI connection or computer goes to sleep.
My solution ended up being to get a cheap usb sound adapter and skip the gpu audio. As the HDMI would only do 4k at 30hz and DP does 4k at 60hz.
Yep. Bluetooth audio is probably best on Linux of the main 3 now that PipeWire exists (literally rock solid, I've never had a connection drop ever), but it's a toss-up when directly comparing CoreAudio to PipeWire. Once PW irons out it's latency issues, Linux may once again become the AV king! (well, maybe not the video portion with the state of Wayland these days...)
^ The only sound issues I've been having these days is Windows 10 randomly deciding to not recognize my USB audio interface after waking from standby and acting as-if I don't have audio output, requiring me to physically plug it out and back in again :)
Linux desktop is amazing these days. Heck, even my mom runs Ubuntu as of 4 months ago and is loving it. Now is time to recommend it. Zoom, teams, webex, Firefox, chrome, Thunderbird, darktable, Gimp, inkscape, blender, kdenlive, openvpn, signal, OBS, stellarium, vim, Python, libreoffice, etc all work perfectly on it. My USB logitec wireless headset was plug and play. Cameras all work fine. Audio is good. Plus lots of power feature capabilities to boot. Whats not to like?
I sorely wish this was the case. I have a W11 install now but always have an extra SSD for a Linux install (right now EndeavourOS with Cinnamon), but there's little things that keep me away from using it fulltime. The majority of them are gaming related, but there are other reasons. Last hiccup I encountered was trying to watch something with a friend over Discord, only to find out audio sharing is nonexistent. There seemed to be a way to pipe all audio through Pipewire mic input and have it work that way, but then I'd lose the noise threshold functionality. Ended up just booting into Windows anyway.
I'm really hoping with SteamOS, the Steam Deck, and the Linus daily challenge videos, the Linux desktop can get more love, but it's just not there for the majority of people yet.
Install pavucontrol, you won't regret it. Best pulseaudio gui, and makes problems easily fixable with one or two clicks.
It shows all active streams per application and lets you choose the correct input and output devices and streams, which makes mic and monitor devices easy to use.
Forcing the use of edge for features that should be browser-neutral like Bing web search from the start menu seems very wrong in terms of user choice. However, if this is Microsoft's version of "Electron" in order to implement parts of the OS, then blocking other browsers seems pretty reasonable. It makes technical sense because they can also directly provide a Windows Login cookie for linking to their apps on the web to make them PWAs for which the user would then already be authenticated.
Maybe all that needs to be done is change things like Bing Search to normal https URL, and maybe remove browser controls like the address bar or bookmarks so they can't be used as a "browser"?
why do you need to ALWAYS stay signed in? for the past decade i have a habit of doing CTRL+SHIFT+P on my firefox and using that. i did a "privatebrowsing.autostart=true" in the past but for a few years, a simple private window is enough.
it takes me 2 seconds to click on sign in to anything and when i close the window, everything is washed away. no more youtube building my profile.
i'm not saying this is for everyone, i have gotten used to no history so i have to "remember" the url or bookmark it.
still, this is too creepy. wittill they remove private browsing mode from chrome/chromium to protect users. smh
While the UI side still needs a lot of work, I find Firefox containers to be a great compromise. Any site I want login or cookies to persist gets a container, and the rest can go in a private window.
No, microsoft-edge links are used through Windows itself when it wants to show a webpage, e.g. from Cortana or a desktop widget. They open in Edge even if you've told Windows you want a different default browser
FWIW seems to me that if you rename msedge.exe to somethingelse.exe, that those microsoft-edge links don't work any longer. I don't know if you can actually get it to open another browser (I tried renaming firefox.exe to msedge.exe without achieving the desired result) but at least you can stop it from opening Edge, if that's what you want.
You can do that but Windows will just put edge back next time you update, or on some schedule, or who f*'ing knows anymore? I've done it several times, verified it won't start from the menu, won't start if I enable News and Weather and click it but somehow a couple days later it's back. I gave up trying to fight with it. If I click something and it opens in edge I just close it and try to never click that thing again.
I've given up using Windows at home, I don't get time lately to play games so I don't miss it. But I'm stuck using it at work and I catch myself wasting time getting upset about Microsoft's behavior with regards to this and have to just remind myself not to worry about it, close the window and move on... I'm there and getting paid to work, not to mess around with stupid crap like this, despite how much it irritates me.
I wonder if it's keeping the protocol ms-edge, although I'd assume you'd have noticed that. I guess you could try creating a tiny app named msedge.exe that reopens the links as https://
A good thing about monopolies is that it gives the government the power to step in and stop anti-consumer abuses. In duopolies, such as Windows/MacOS or iPhone/Android, the government doesnt have as much power.
Anti-trust laws are not only for true monopolies. Any company that has a significant percentage in the market (determined by the regulations and courts) can be scrutinized under anti-trust laws. At least in the EU.
I think this is a pointless distinction, and I'm not a lawyer, but I also don't think it even matters from a legal perspective whether a company is a Hasbro-style 100% monopoly. The reason the government is going after these companies is probably just because the people in charge are incompetent and/or lazy morons.
Anyone on the fence about ditching Windows for Linux should just do it. If you pick a popular distro and hardware you'll likely run into only minimal issues, if any. My sound and wifi worked right out of the box even though I built my own system.
Why anyone still puts up with this garbage, abusive, disrespectful OS is beyond me.
More people should be contacting developer's support and asking for a Linux release. I find it quite sad that they are still ignoring multi-platform support, especially after MacOS popularity (and powerful M1) and Vulkan API and DXVK on Linux. There is even the Steam on Linux and SteamOS.
ive had to break down and at least have a windows vm. ive picked up making music as a hobby and all the various production and plugin-in software is a no go with linux. Same with VR related things. I would love to get a mac, but unfortunately arm isn't really supported for my other use cases (ros middleware robotics)
Same in my case. I am a music hobbyist, and invested some money in tools that work only on Windows and MacOs.
Of course, I could start from scratch, learn a new tool, pick up some compatible vsts, but really it is not the same.
When the day comes when I have no longer the choice (i.e. I am forced to upgrade to windows 11), I may reconsider everything: should I make the switch to MacOs and their closed OS ? Should relearn everything on linux, and loose some of the professional tools that I am using ?
OSS fanboys have been hailing the coming of Linux on personal computers for years, but it just looks like Windows 11 might be the thing that makes it real, forcing it finally to mature.
This is not Vista times, where you can easily get away with a bad OS generation. For the first time in about 12 years I'm dual booting Win 10 and KDE on Ubuntu, and it actually feels like a usable and practical setup.
Win 11 really seems to be hateful of users almost. Does it have a target audience anymore, or is it now designed by Mac users that work at MS? Seems like almost everyone should stay on Win 10 or migrate to Mac or Linux. The greatest strength Windows had was that developers could mess around while non-techies would always have a way to do whatever work they needed.
I had to install the last Win 11 release candidate the week before the official release because I needed a new function in WSL2 that was simply unavailable without being part of the "Insiders Program".
I gave it a week instead of a day because I'm old and change is difficult but, if anything, the productivity impacts of their design choices were even more apparent at the end of that week.
Force tab grouping on the Taskbar? That stupid half context menu that requires an additional click to reach the real context menu?
Everything seemed designed to take at least two more clicks than Win10 while offering worse situational awareness as to what was open on my workstation.
I agree, Win11 is not a love letter to users. It's a drunken 3AM rant.
They have plenty of time and moat to get away with it. The success of Windows is not because people like it, but because it's the de facto standard PC OS. Drivers are built for Windows, computers come preinstalled with Windows, schools teach Windows and Office, businesses are already invested in Windows. This is not going to change just because Windows is somewhat annoying.
Even if Windows market share dwindles, just imagine how many legacy systems are still running on it. These systems, along with the support contract Microsoft negotiated with them, are what will keep them alive indefinitely. Not forever, of course, but the end is not soon either.
They remember the actual outcome. They lost the case but the Bush Administration chose to not really enforce any significant penalties. End result was very little cost to Microsoft. They did change their practices for awhile but have slowly crept back to the same lockin.
When Apple does similar things everyone praises them for it.
Apple's default web browser is Safari on iOS and no one ever sued Apple over it.
At some point, you have to just recognize that the world is different today. The general market has accepted walled garden OSes with anti-competitive behavior towards common applications.
IIRC, all web browsers on iOS are using the Safari rendering engine though.
So its still Safari underneath it all. Much like how Internet Explorer / Edge on Windows is really just a Chrome renderer / frontend these days.
EDIT: And since Google is in charge of the Chrome renderer, Microsoft absolutely has less control over internet-APIs / Javascript APIs / CSS details than say... Apple or Google does. Which is the "monopoly" bit that we're really worried about.
When you consider which company "controls the web", its Google or Apple. Microsoft really doesn't have much control of it.
With the new Edge they're giving themselves a boost. They probably won't catch up to Chrome so easily but will have more to say about the underlying engine in a few years time.
Brave is your browser UI. The rendering engine underneath is Safari, as it is with all browsers on iPhone/iPad. The version of Safari is slightly hobbled from the main one, though far less so than it used to be when Apple kept all browsers using a severely hobbled rendering engine making them much slower than Safari proper.
> Apple's default web browser is Safari on iOS and no one ever sued Apple over it.
Apple doesn't have that kind of market share to warrant it. Tangentially, Apple products are aspirational, so they never won't have it, that would lose the appeal. Microsoft, on the other hand, pushes their products every way imaginable, and many of their users use them because they have to.
That's a weak argument. Apple is about 50% of the smartphone market in the US alone.
If you're looking for reasoning/justification behind why Apple got away with something like this, blame the government agencies for not doing their jobs.
IMO, it's slightly unfair that Microsoft got hit with that lawsuit back in the day. They 100% deserved it, but it put them at a disadvantage some years later against all of the other monopolists in the tech industry who were not being scrutinized for doing the exact same (and worse) things.
I've heard a rumour that the Microsoft anti trust actions in the states were more a proxy war to get Microsoft to play nice with the federal government wrt 'lawful intercept'.
Brave also used this workaround.
When workarounds are used by a few (EdgeDeflector), this methods usually pass under the radar... When a lot of users start using them they're quickly patched. Sadly, this fix shows that you can't bully the bullies in their own turf. But Microsoft should never forget the Antitrust lawsuit back in 2001.
Because this time around, MS can point at the entire FAANG and say "why aren't you doing anything about _them_?" Which would be deflection, of course ("whatever, we aren't talking about FAANG right now") but politically strong enough, IMO, to make it scary to sue any of the big tech unless you're willing to go against all of them.
Be prepared to have a VM and pass through devices to it in order to configure them. "Gamer device" manufacturers easily the worst of the worst when it comes to Linux support.
> "Gamer device" manufacturers easily the worst of the worst when it comes to Linux support.
And Windows too. Logitech software is an example of that, their capture software refused to recognize an older functional generation of webcam like C910. It is capable of recording 1080p60 5 years ago. Their older version software (Logitech Webcam Software) no longer works in Windows 10. Tried to use OBS to get it to 60 FPS, nope! Somehow LWS have a secret sauce to get my C910 to record in 1080p60 setting.
And their Logitech G Hub suck balls for my G600. Unfortunately, I couldn't get Logitech Gaming Software (predecessor for G Hub) working in my main computer. Kept throwing up error when I tried to install it. LGS works better for my G600 than G Hub.
I can't say I've used it personally but I know of OpenRGB[1], which should help with lighting on those types of computer devices. Maybe that might do the trick?
Yep, I have a Razer mouse and it works fine on Ubuntu/i3, just had to adjust the sensitivity down so it wasn't flinging the pointer around the screen at the slightest touch.
My escape plan is to use Wine for the apps that exist on Windows only.
Wine can be a bit lacking though :-(
But there's hope on the horizon: Valve's SteamDeck is aiming to make available all Valve's games, even the Windows-only ones, on their custom Arch Linux. using Proton (which is a fork of Wine). As far as I know, this might be the first commercial product that's based on (a fork of) Wine.
If they can make all tripleA Windows games with DRM work on their SteamDeck, this will make a serious dent in Windows' monopoly on gaming. And in the process hopefully Wine will get a boost as well...
Didn't they lose a pretty big antitrust lawsuit over this a couple decades ago? Has the regulatory landscape changed to the point that they think they can just start this right up again? Or is it more, there's no way anyone could believe a Microsoft browser could dominate anymore?
They did not. Even when they were under the settlement agreement and had to prompt for installation of another default browser at first boot IE was still included in the OS and certain items opened in IE no matter what your default browser was set to. This is the same situation. They are not blocking setting of the browser for general urls but for edge links. Edge links are used by particular software in Windows. For instance the help system always opens pages in Edge.
Whether this is the correct thing for them to do is debatable, but it is not the behavior which got them in trouble during the early browser wars.
The first step in antitrust is to define the market. It seems unlikely that desktop/laptop would be considered a separate market - mobile is just too capable (how do you even draw the line between an iPad Pro and a laptop?) But even within desktop/laptop you have Apple plus Chromebooks and to some extent Linux as substitutes. There were no serious substitutes in the 1995-1997 time period that led to the antitrust proceedings.
Phones are not capable in the same way. And I think this number already counts chromebooks. Let me know what your revised number is for ipad pros.
> There were no serious substitutes in the 1995-1997 time period that led to the antitrust proceedings.
Macs were just fine then, and they're just fine now. They couldn't run all important business software then, and they can't run all important business software now.
As someone who used Firefox and has Windows 11, how is it going to affect me? My links open in Firefox only (and the only time I open links is either from WhatsApp or occasionally some link in a doc file or PDF I am reading). It works fine for me so far.
I think it's only for 'microsoft-edge:' URLs, used by certain Windows features (e.g. Bing search from the start menu, or opening the online help via a link in the Settings). Most other links will just be normal http:/https: links and will use your actual default browser.
If I have an OS and I want to deeply integrate the browser into the OS for use-cases other than general browsing of the web, why can't there be browser specific URLs to accomplish that?
Is there a complete list of microsoft-edge:// use cases? I know there is a News integration to the taskbar.
I love standards but sometimes you have edge use cases that the entire world doesn't need or can adopt. Why can't a browser have proprietary features along with URLs that make sure that a browser supporting those URLs be used?
How do you even QA or support a deep browser integration into your OS when the browser can be switched to a 3rd party one?
If those deep integrations (News, etc) also prompt you to change your default browser for general web surfing then yes, that would be anticompetitive behavior. Does it do that?
I'm pretty sure there will be some community programs that will fix this again. Just takes some time I guess. Currently I'm still waiting until I get the feeling that win11 is "finished".
Parent didn't "say" that at all. It was a question, not a statement, which explains why the question mark was used: "how is it going to affect me?" At the end, the user gives us the courtesy of reporting what behavior they observed, which is all too often lacking.
I need a new computer, and I was going to switch to Windows so I could game with friends (while dual-booting into some linux distro for anything programming related), which would force me into 11. It's already a shame that I have to have a Microsoft account to even set up the damn thing, but now I can't even use whatever default browser I want? I'm seriously about the say screw it and pay for another Mac. I love mine, but wanted to game but at this point it might not be worth it.
There are entire categories of games that are total non starters in Linux. VR games, sim racing and most competitive games with anti cheat systems for a start.
Don't get me wrong, this is some absolute BS from MSoft, but no it's not accurate to say you can't use whatever default browser you want. It's that there are a very few select things that force you into opening a link in edge - as far as I'm aware this is functionality mostly limited to just websearch from the start menu. So if you prefer to Google/DuckDuckGo your shit by first opening a browser, this won't really affect you. It's important philosophically and as an indicator of Msoft's behaviour/strategy, but doesn't considerably affect users too much.
Caveat - I haven't used Windows 11 so I'm unaware if they've enhanced the number of places that these edge specific links are used. In windows 10 I haven't even bothered to implement some workaround because I never want to search the web from my start menu
Most "help"/"support" links on Windows 10 (and likely 11 too, but I'm not curious to find out) in things like the control panel or built-in applications also use this protocol and force open Edge.
On Windows, apps can register URIs for them to handle. For example, steam uses steam://. The actual behavior is determined by the app.
According to Microsoft's documentation[0], the microsoft-edge:// scheme opens the edge browser and navigates to the specified URL.
If what is claimed in the article is implemented, it will provide a way to bypass the default browser setting. The system will launch edge even if you set another browser as your default web browser, bringing the problem of leaking MS account information that comes with the edge.
They use this scheme throughout the system, for example after clicking on a search result from the Cortana search. That basically skips your default browser settings and opens sites in Edge.
I hope one day Microsoft realises that their user-hostile actions are dissuading engineers from looking for jobs there. I for one never will. Hell would freeze over sooner.
And yet most people keep trusting them with their code on Github. If people were smart, there would be Freenode-level mass migration away from GH the day the Microsoft purchase was confirmed. But no, everybody will only scream once Microsoft does something shady, as they inevitably will.
> And yet most people keep trusting them with their code on Github.
Honestly, from what I've seen many people don't see the issue with this. "The code is public anyway, so what difference does it make?"
I'm starting to see the downsides of that viewpoint now, though[0]. If GitHub, and by extension Microsoft, technically 'own' the code (licensing, etc.) then they have free reign over it, leading to things like Copilot and Intellicode.
Sourceforge was also great in the beginning but slowly rotted from one bad monetization idea after another. I hope github doesn't go that way but I'm not optimistic.
Ok I’ll take the contrarian view. Why is it a big deal that a specialized url scheme is specifically intended to launch a Microsoft browser? Only apps built by Microsoft will use that scheme.
Because Microsoft makes Windows, and therefore can force anything Windows tries to open to use that scheme. This means you can never view search results, weather, news, etc. that Windows provides to you integrated into its experience in any browser other than edge.
But they don’t. Microsoft could do this. Apple could do that. Google could do this and that. I don’t give much of a shit what someone could do. Biden could order a nuclear attack on Finland. China could order all references to their president baseball be replaced by the word baseball. Linus could merge in whatever the fuck to the kernel. But if he did, everyone would panic, so let’s wait until they do the thing
Because it’s hyperbole. Not in the sense of it not being literally true, but hyperbolic in the sense that it is both an avoidable and limited to first party properties. It’s also not abusing existing standards. Instead of redirecting all browser links through Edge, they made a handler that specifies Edge. Firefox decided that it would ignore this design and hijack links that are specified to use Edge.
Let me give you a real example. Microsoft has a link to manage your Microsoft account online. This opens in Edge and thus can auto-login to your account. That is the expected and secure behavior. Firefox shouldn’t be able to hijack that.
Also you can still use any browser to check the weather. Just not via the integrated windows app.
You go to your system settings, and set your "default Web browser".
You use any feature of the OS that would open a Web page, like Start menu searches, "help" links (that nowadays are just links to Bing searches, another shitshow I won't get into), or dynamic wallpaper info bites.
The system says "fuck you" and opens the browser that is more convenient to their economic goals rather than your explicit choice.
Is it illegal? Thank god no. Is it subversive and a complete dick move? Definitely.
Do we really need legislation that digs so deep in the implementation details of computers?
I would think at most something along "systems should respect user preferences where available", but definitely not "systems should never override a user preference", since there are valid cases for the latter.
As far as privacy is concerned, there's not much difference between using someone's browser and inviting them into you home. Imagine two people show up at your door. One is your trusted friend. The other is your landlord's friend, and you don't trust them.
Would it be a big deal for your landlord to push his friend in the door when you try to let your friend in? After all, he owns the home (you just pay for a license to use it), and he trusts his friend, so why should you care?
It's a good thing because surely some of those who are still putting up with MS may decide enough is enough.
Whoever you are, that the wonderful, fully gaming capable world of Linux is there. We have some cookies but Valve is bringing a massive cake early next year.
I always thought the antitrust ruling against Microsoft was a bit heavy-handed (and I say this as a former Mozilla employee). Like, it was the 90s... most people wouldn't know how to download and install a browser in the first place, so bundling (much like how iOS comes with Safari) seems fair.
But then they do shitty stuff like this, and it's a reminder of how overly anti-competitive Microsoft really can be. It's one thing to bundle, and it's another to make it so hard to switch that people finally just give in.
If you happen to have a PC with OEM-installed Windows, you can switch to Linux and use the Windows license (stored in firmware) to legally install Windows in a Virtual Machine (so the license is not wasted):
Is this really an issue? I clicked the help files in windows and it always opened in IE6. It wasn’t more than an annoyance. Can you uninstall edge? I think it’s a sensationalist topic, it’s closing a potential security hole if FF or other browsers aren’t updated.
Do I agree with it? No, I use Linux but it’s really not an issue that hasn’t been around and isn’t easily ignored, and many people may never encounter it.
Is this something that could have been forced on the desktop team by the management of the Edge team? I'm sure the people actually making the OS care about their users, or at least the product itself. Meanwhile, the Edge team don't care. Anyway everybody uses Chrome, (and if they don't they are still using Chrome).
A lot of people complaining about Windows 11 here. I suggest giving Linux a try! It just works these days. Ubuntu, Mint, and Elementary are fun places to start.
"But can I use $MS_THING ?" Yes, if you insist. Just spin up a VM. But really, if work isn't forcing you to use a particular tool, there are better ways of doing that :-)
My thought was that Ubuntu &c. are more "just works" than Debian, and that would be better for new users. I mentally classify Mint with the *Ubuntus. Ubuntu by default used to contain more proprietary, closed-source stuff which, sadly, results in more things (peripherals, wifi, graphics, etc.) just working. Is this no longer true?
It is still true but many other distros have them too now. I've found Linux Mint, which was originally based on Ubuntu, to be much nicer and upgrades are easier.
I'm not a fan of Ubuntu creating their SNAP store which seems like a play to get a monopoly on Linux.
I wonder how many people will actually switch away from Windows this time. It’s interesting to see people saying they will stick with Windows 10, when the same thing was said about the Windows 7-10 transition.
Will people eventually just get worn down like last time, my guess is probably. But maybe that is too pessimistic
I don't think many would change, because that's a lot of effort. What would make a difference is, for example, a flavor Linux to become default. If someone would buy a notebook preinstalled with Kubuntu and it would be usable enough so that the buyer won't need to install Windows. This is why I think that, for example, Valve's work in the Linux space is so important.
Windows 10 and 11 retail "user experience" seems to be written with telemetry in mind. You as a home user don't even need to pay for windows anymore if you are ok with the watermark. However you shouldn't mess with their telemetry-exporter-disguised-as-a-chrome-reskin golden egg.
What would you people suggest is the most Windows-like Linux distro to switch over? I'm thinking in terms of visual similarity, UX, key bindings, and such for everyday usage.
The desktop environment, not the distro, is what really matters. I'd look into a distro that is easy to install and comes packaged with the KDE desktop environment. Most of the popular distros fit that requirement.
A few other desktop environments also look like Windows, but I find KDE to be the most similar to Windows 10.
Kubuntu fits this bill in my opinion. If you take a look at their feature tour[0], it uses similar paradigms as Windows. And Ubuntu is widely supported, and their package directory is quite good.
I put Win 11 on one of my laptops so I can test. But for the rest of my windows machines - I usually wait till the dust settles and it proves not to be yet another Vista or Win 8.
I am an amateur developper and honestly pity the MS browser team. It must not be that obvious to think they you develop a browser which usual usage is to download another browser.
Why do people still run Windows? Linux is almost universally easier to use now (except for a few things like scanner and printer setup), and gaming has almost caught up as well (with things like Steam, and that's if you're not already using a dedicated console, SteamDeck, or mobile device.)
At work, I can understand it a bit more, but I can't understand why anyone would still choose Windows as a desktop at home.
Because the $200 crappy laptop you buy in the store comes with Windows preinstalled and people couldn't care less about their operating system as long as they can write the TPS report they need for work.
one day operating systems will be “living”, and will be able to analyze and run code just from reading documentation and source files. completely sci-fi right now. anyways, microsoft shutting out firefox sounds anti-competition
MS is getting desperate. This shill [^1] had the audacity to reply to a tweet I made praising the very excellent FOSS Zotero bibliography manager with a suggestion to use Edge. Like, come on. Amusingly, Twitter initially hid his tweet with "Tweet may contain offensive material." Offensive to a FOSS-loving mind indeed.
> One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.
Is it "shilling" if you're a project manager recommending your product? He doesn't appear to be posing as anything other than a Microsoft employee working on the Edge team.
Pretty sure that to be a shill, your relationship to the thing being promoted has to be hidden. We don't refer to marketing folks as shills. Parasites maybe, badum-ching.
Even in windows 10 in a virtual machine I cannot download chrome and install it. I have to use virtualbox to transfer the installer and run it that way. Poor Microsoft has to use such tactics because their software blows (they know windows sucks and they have no control over it anymore) and they can only barely hold on with these tactics. Wasn't there an antitrust lawsuit which they some how won because of violations lesser than this?
You're conflating two different issues; Windows 11's broken/anti-competitive default browser changing UI has been improved (although annoying popups remain), but those defaults are only used by non-Microsoft software.
Microsoft's other software uses "microsoft-edge://" links which simply ignore the user's default browser choice and open in Edge. When a workaround was found to fix this (i.e. to obey the user's choice), Microsoft blocked it.
Plus Microsoft rushed out this Edge-link workaround patch to retail, while sitting on the default browser UI improvements until next year.
The fix from that article has to do with how one would go about setting a different default browser. Earlier, they had to do this by associating the browser with filetypes, so, someone would have to make multiple changes to fully set their browser default. Now, you can just set the browser like you would think.
The issue at hand though has to do with other links within windows that open web pages. Microsoft had used a different protocol (not https, but, something like microsoft-edge://). I think these links are like news items that show up in the start menu, etc. There was no way to set Firefox to open these links with what Windows provided, it only opened in Edge. A program was written that listens for these protocols, and would let the user customize what program opened with those links were clicked. Microsoft has now shut that option down.
The problem is that the microsoft-edge:// protocol is used throughout the Windows UI and menus and will always open in Edge regardless of the user's preferences. If you click on a link in say, the Settings UI, it will ignore your default browser preference and open in Edge with no way to change it.
Even if you uninstall edge, you can't make windows stop trying to open `microsoft-edge://` links with edge. The default-program-settings page lists it but it's a cruel joke because it doesn't let you actually pick anything except edge; you can't pick a custom program like you can for every other protocol. There are corresponding entries in the registry, and those you can edit to point at firefox... but they are simply ignored. It's quite frustrating.
I wonder if they plan on using that protocol to do non-standard stuff that third party browsers won't support? That's the only technical reason I can think of for Microsoft to create a new protocol.
There's no problem with microsoft-edge: existing. The problem is that it's extensively used by things built in to Windows, which isn't fixed whatsoever by creating a firefox: protocol too.
it's a link buried inside a lot of the bundled utilities in Windows. It forces URLs to use Edge as the browser instead of your chosen default one.
Windows 11 has a news & weather popup widget that sits down by the clock, in which you can click on the live tiles shown to take you to more info on the web. This widget uses microsoft-edge:// URI scheme so Edge is ALWAYS invoked.
Mozilla tried to hack their way around it, and it's been a few weeks of cat and mouse on it. At the moment, MS are winning.
It's like they've totally forgotten the events of the IE anti-trust stuff.
> Basically, this means that “microsoft-edge:// links” can no longer be forced to open in your default browser of choice
So wait... Links that specifically REQUEST to be OPENED IN EDGE cannot be overridden to open with an arbitrary program? So just don't use those links. Problem solved.
The irony here is anyone who actually cares enough to be angered by Microsoft opening links in Edge rather than their preferred browse would never use "Start menu search" or other noob features.
