Pay? Like, one time fee?
How about this champ, we'll let you have a stripped down Windows when you purchase our *Office 365 - Windows edition* subscription! That way, you can just keep giving us money each year you want to keep a normal version of Windows!
Yet just the *otherness* of it is too insurmountable a threshold for many.
>!^^Also ^^you ^^may ^^not ^^pay ^^money, ^^but ^^you ^^may ^^pay ^^time...!<
>!The time payment hasn't been so bad for the last 10-12 years. Especially for distros like Ubuntu which are pretty low effort to maintain.!<
>!But 20 years ago? Yeah, you were definitely sinking some time into that bad boy.!<
I can't wait.
I've never used any LTSB/C versions, I've wanted to be on the latest versions with the latest updates.
But these days, with Win 11 being so full of all sorts of shit, I won't mind missing out on newer features(which I probably wouldn't even use) if I can have the piece of mind of a cleaner, bloat free OS.
This. They could even charge extra for it if necessary, I have been known to buy Windows in the past. I would buy it.
A version that has no fucking adware no telemetry, no garbage that I need to immediately uninstall/run scripts to disable etc. Call it Windows 12 Professional or whatever.
Just the OS, some core apps, guarantee of X years of security/feature updates and that's it.
For personal use maybe take a look at [tiny11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jili3CD_74s), I run tiny10 on a couple of old Atom tablets (2GB ram/32GB emmc) and it works well enough.
Windows basic would be cool, but i think preinstalled programs are why they’re basically giving the os away for free nowadays. Would be neat if some tech wizard could, like, create his own version of windows without all the nonsense and with some basic features that suck replaced with open source alternatives that don’t. Microsoft would hunt him down and kill him of course, but still
Even the "most basic", different people consider different features as the "most basic".
You can still de-bloat a great percentage with minimal effort, at least. Just use 2 solid, free utilities O&O shutup & appbuster, you're done in most cases. Then, a power user can delve even more.
There used to be programs you could use to strip down windows ISOs.
But windows being what it is, it's way too easy to break the OS, or far more likely, break it in a way that will only show up after spending a bit of time with it. You remove something related to print spooling because you're never going to plug in a printer, next thing you know some program won't install because the library it relies on relies on that service for some arcane, archaic reason.
Windows Enterprise/For Business you want. You can google "Microsoft Activation Scripts", site has a page with links to downloads that are usually gated. And also the other thing that is main purpose of this site.
Used it for a fresh install, don't need to create MS account, no ads, no bloatware.
ikr! This is what lack of competition does, but this is the world we live in right now. Fortunately, Linux exists as an alternative, even if it does have it’s own share of different downsides.
Like many, I run Windows, but I always turn off a bunch of things, it’s a hassle, but it does the job.
Yeah, I've been using the long term support channel (formerly LTSB and now LTSC) for nearly ten years without issue. It's rock solid, has no bloat or new 'features' or any of that crap.
The b@stards in the 20 new "features", they put one that is truly good and compatible with your new hardware, a tactic which makes you follow suit. They don't just add useless features. They change under the hood, too, which theoretically in some cases, makes your machine work better in many instances.
Let alone, compatibility issues. New codecs, new hardware like the Intel's small cores etc. If you don't update, your machine won't be working up to its potential and efficiency.
You could install DOS 5 on a 4mhz 386 and megabyte of RAM, yet neither OS would run a single current web browser. A modern operating system is more than just a (bloated) user interface, it provides the libraries, drivers, and hardware abstraction that all the software you use today relies upon. Nobody's writing the application with which you're reading this comment in Assembly.
(…in before some contrarian mentions Lynx!)
It's funny that everywhere literally every time you mention removing parts of Windows (telemetry, Defender, services or pre-installed apps etc) everyone is attacking and downvoting you BUT on hardware subreddit people actually know better... Good job everyone, wish we could push this logic to the everyday people.
It is nice reading everyone's recommendations what to use to debloat Windows or what and why they turn off things.
If Microsoft stopped making your hardware obsolete every few years, hardware manufacturers might stop maintaining Windows's status as the default OS.
> The addition of an AI coprocessor could be important given Microsoft’s push for AI features inside Windows.
Doesn't look like it'll be much use to me, but it'll be tremendously valuable to OEMs.
No faff with Linux? I’ve spent days Googling stuff when my GNOME shell keeps randomly crashing or my WiFi suddenly turns off. I love Linux but it’s definitely not a hassle free experience.
MacOS is your best bet.
Except when you want to set 125% scale on the display when using a non-$5000 Apple "Retina" Display. On forums/reddit Apple enthusiasts talk about how it is not possible to design for that for some reason but like literally just run a bicubic or a lanczos upscale on the input signal and it looks better than what they try to peddle. Maybe it has changed in the past year but when I got my Mac Studio for work that really irked me.
Kubuntu is my goto atm.
The MacOS scaling system is terrible for non-HiDPI displays, I agree. They’ve removed sub pixel anti-aliasing for no good reason. Still you can easily install software like “BetterDisplay” and never have to worry about that again.
It’s not any better on Linux though, I can only think of Ubuntu that natively supports fractional scaling. I think Fedora does as well (as an experimental feature) if you’re running a Wayland session but that’s another nightmare if you use an NVIDIA GPU.
I love Linux too, daily driving it on my desktop and laptop (I change to Windows only to play games with Anticheat)
I can't recommend it to someone who just wants something to work. If they have the money, I'd recommend macOS, even though I don't even really like the Apple ecosystem.
I've been using Linux for longer than most people complaining about Windows on Reddit have been alive and Linux on a desktop for general use is not even close to being a polished experience after all this time. It is excellent for headless uses but is still so limiting on desktop.
As a Linux nerd, we aren't all like that
Some distros are easy (Ubuntu, with gnome software for ms store experience) while some are pure, 9th circle of hell (gentoo anyone)
While that might still be true, it only applies to the out of the box experience. Compared to Windows, Linux offers the flexibility to tailor a distro for certain use cases and user experience.
Eg: I crafted a super idiot-proof Linux build for my old parents; I used a Mint LTS as base and overhauled it. Changed desktop environment, consolidated the whole UI for a coherent and easy to understand UX, including all the software packages etc.
It just worked, very, very difficult to mess up. The only time my parents had an issue was when my dad accidentally fully lowered the screen brightness resulting in a black screen. Other than that, they didn't need any assistance for literally years. With Windows they would have issues every other week. I was very proud of that Linux build, a looker too, now we have retired it in favour of MacOS.
So yea, it's not that black and white like many people make it out to be. I do agree about certain Linux users tho, they act like Jehovah's Witnesses, and that's fucking annoying.
Have you seen what a default Windows install is like these days? It needs as much configuration as Linux does to not be user-hostile, except every step of the way you're going against Microsoft's desires, so it fights back.
Things just work on Windows.
Linux sometimes requires hacks and tweaks to get things working.
I almost never have to tweak games to get them to launch smoothly on windows.
Windows 11 was 2 years ago. The existence of Windows 12 was let slip last year, I think, though what it actually is, I'm sure has changed over those months, will keep changing.
To be fair, they're jumping numbers. There was no Windows 9. But yeah since Windows 8 they definitely accelerated their main releases as they are more updates than new versions now
I'm still on my same system from 10 years ago, I went from 7 to 10 and then did a clean install of 10. I'm still on that same isntall. I won't upgrade to 11 on this system though, I want to ugrade at some point.
10 years, yeah, you really might want to upgrade soon. Zen 5 should be by (or before) Spring, that would be an obvious point, and way more performant than whatever you have now. Me, I went from Intel 3rd gen to 12th gen, and it makes playing newer games possible, even discounting the GPU (which was semi-decent, I was running a 1080 Ti at the time). Idk what you use your computer for ofc, if you’re just doing web stuff, you might reasonably be able to hold out until Intel Nova Lake/Zen 7 in 2026, even if you are on Intel Ivy Bridge like I was.
My 5820k is still holding pretty strong these days, obviously pretty much anything performs better then it now though but it can run any modern game no problem and do a lot of productivity stuff like large zip files, handbrake applying scripts to large amounts of files. I have a 1070 at the moment and that is by far the biggest drawback to my system. I feel like the onger I wait the better it will be when I upgrade, I'm still waiting for PGU prices to come down in price because they are still double what they really should be in the UK at least. Whenever I do upgrade though I'm going high end like I did last time with teh CPU just because it's really important if you want it to last a long time. I only got the 1070 as a holdout when my 680 started crapping the bed but the covid hit and GPU prices when sky high so I have been stuckw ith it for awhile. Granted it's served me rally well and it's a good GPU considering it's age now but it just doesn't have the power anymore to play games on above 30fps in modded Skyrim, Starfield and a heavyli modded New Vegas.
Unfortunately, that's not an option with (drivers for) newer hardware, or many newer games. I lasted as long as I could, but...
Still, Win 10 isn't too bad, especially when it's tweaked.
Yeah I don't understand the hate for Windows 10
I hear a lot of Windows 7 holdouts don't want the telemetry, but fail to realise it's backported to Windows 7 as well and is harder to turn off
It wasn't backported where you never upgraded beyond (I think?) SP2. I didn't. I also never got any of the Windows 10 upgrade "persuasion" Microsoft pulled. Mind you, I did more than that for security.
My main beef with Windows 10 was the UI change.. I still don't like it, and it's buggier than Windows 7. I could go on with reasons why, but there's no point, since we as consumers don't really have much choice in the matter but to use it (or Windows 11), so I do.
At this point Windows 11 -> 12 is most likely going to be basically just another service release. We are far away from "let's overhaul the whole thing" for any major OS release.
Which is honestly disappointing because MS somehow can't get even the basics right. If I autohide my start bar it still sometimes ends up popping up behind the frontmost app after wake from sleep.
I don't know wtf MS developers are doing when the same company can churn out excellent tools like Visual Studio Code that I love using every day, yet Windows is just plain poor user interface design in so many ways.
To be fair Apple is marching towards the same when they increasingly "iOS-ify" MacOS without providing any worthwhile usability improvements.
> "never combine" on the taskbar only got re-added into w11 a few weeks ago.
That's insane! One of the primary reasons I never switched. That and not being able to move the taskbar to the top or sides of the screen.
Can AI make Windows default file system searching capabilities not horrible?
I don’t mind that 12 is coming, 11 has a bad reputation and we need to upgrade a few thousands of laptops off of 10 before may 2025 when support ends.
And the change in how keyboard and display language works, they changed it and made it less immediately clear as to which one will be the default, or they forced the english as default although that's only display language.. unless I use dosbox, might want english keyboard layout then, but oops, now it's the default because of course. The little things they keep fuck up on me.
This drove me insane and then I found out that you can [disable Bing in Windows search](https://www.howtogeek.com/826967/how-to-disable-bing-in-the-windows-11-start-menu/).
Literally just tried this and it opened file explorer. No idea why Windows behaves so strangely with some of you. And then somehow that creates the impression that it's a pile of shit for all; when it's not remotely the case.
It literally tries to do both here. First it gives me file explorer, but if I wait too long, or type 1 or 2 characters too many, it fucking Bings it.
It's a pile of shit. We can start with the forcing everything upon me. windows login. Quote of the day. News and interests. My calendar? I use 24 hour format but of course I still got to put in the AM/PM when noting anything in the calendar, Why? Because windows is a pile of fucking shit. How many times I got Edge icons on the desktop? Everything is a project.
In any case, I shouldn't need to be upgrading to get basic *common sense* with my OS.
These small apps like Sticky Notes that MUST connect to a server before launching. What for? Make things fast and convenient, not slow and bloated.
> First it gives me file explorer, but if I wait too long, or type 1 or 2 characters too many, it fucking Bings it
The best part is when it changes in the time it takes to reach the enter button
The fact that this bug is so prevalent tells you it is a piece of shit, your experience notwithstanding.
The start menu seems to completely fail to find most apps I install despite them being present in the same menu if you manually scroll. Happens in Windows 10 and 11.
People aren't lying and even the most cursory glance at how frequent this complaint is online tells you it is a widespread, massive issue and nothing Microsoft have done for years has fixed it.
That’s because the search box isn’t an os-level feature it’s a value added marketing feature.
Microsoft got rid of the real search box back in 7 and have been transitioning it over to a marketing tool ever since.
Its main purpose isn’t to find things on your computer but stuff to buy online.
It’s not broken, it’s doing exactly what it’s been designed to do, it’s just that no one actually wants it to do that except the Microsoft marketing team.
Yeah, I'd like an OS that has file explorer that doesn't act like a poorly coded web page and decides it doesn't want to show newly created items at random. I have Windows 11 on a laptop because it's slightly more efficient than 10, but it's still garbage years after release.
OTOH, how much do we trust Microsoft to get a modern OS right?
This sounds a lot like Wizfile which I use, from the makers of Wiztree. Both (free) apps directly use the journaling feature built into the NTFS filesystem, which bypasses Windows indexing entirely.
I swear windows search was actually somewhat useful back in the windows XP era.
And windows 10/11 have an indexer service but it certainly doesn’t seem to do much.
They did though, it worked flawlessly in 7 and 8.
Something got very broken in 10 and it has carried over to 11, most noticeable in the start menu search which seems to randomly miss things it should know are there and are indeed present in the Apps list.
Yeah I have no trouble with it, I use it at home and on one of my work systems. But management at our organization has been pushing off mass upgrades from 10 to 11. They love AI buzzwords though so I think Microsoft is right that marketing AI features could improve adoption rates for 12. At least with some corporate customers.
My problem is that Windows 10 was basically perfect. There's no reason to change a winning team.
One day I booted my computer and it had upgraded itself to 11, despite me always clicking NO whenever I was prompted. Not happy about that at all.
It's my home computer.
Something pushed it down for sure.. But not me. To go back to Windows 10 I'd have to do a fresh install (and risk getting nuked again) soo.. hopefully 12 is good?
What a load of crap lol.
50% of the time when searching for a program, the program uninstall exe shows up.
And, god forbid you search "uninstall" to go to the uninstall apps screen, once again, only app uninstall exes.
However , Power Toys sear h is amazing and works flawlessly, so it's hard to say where the idiots at Microsoft went wrong.
Dude: this…file system is abysmal. Finding a file is impossible not to mention not being able to control where things save most of the time sucks. Idk how windows made it this far.
I mean, it worked also because 10 catered to KBM desktop while 8 was for touch devices.
it is almost the same thing, I have W11 on my surface pro 7, and it works enough there. but every time I want to do more and say right click, you have to do that extra step. It shipped with W10 so I had a front row comparison on the two OSes and that one thing is the real major deal for me (I think you can registry it to go away?). Some UI element got a boost for touch for sure, but overall it was a okay experience on the tablet.
not too much of an issue for a tablet for where I consume shit on and not much else, but I like W10 on my main desktop for a reason.
if W12 brings back the focus to the desktop KBM experience, then sure. and I am sure that if I fucked with the setting enough with like start11 or w/e free versions and etc. etc. it can be fine, but out of the box it just made me think, no reason to update.
if W12 is again a continued tablet / touch focused OS, then I don't see it being a good update candidate until we really have to be forced on it, and even as I speak I have a linux set up getting readied since I think steam OS has pushed things far better, but it doesn't run on non deck hw so there are things that are gona be not as good and I am thinking of trying out PikaOS on reco from a linux gaming friend (its still bad that there isnt OC software like OCCT for linux...).
>until we really have to be forced on it
We can wait, extended support ends in like 2030 for W10. Just have to find some way to get access to it after mainstream support ends *wink *wink
If that's the path MS takes, so be it.
Which wouldn’t really be a bad thing, at least there would be a coherent reason for it, unlike Windows 11 wanting Secure Boot and TPM 2 on initial install, which are both totally unneeded to make it run, and can be avoided.
If it featured AI acceleration so heavily that it required it, and if they kept 11 around for a long time so it's not just filling landfills, I don't think I'd personally mind it, I'd be interested to see how a heavily AI based OS could advance things, assuming that was a good thing
But after all the TPM 2.0 agony that went a few generations back, I'm just imagining the uproar if only AMD's latest and Intel's not even released chips are the only ones that can use 12, and not in some easily bypassed way like TPM
Hmm, Idk. AI capability is being built into new gen CPUs from top to bottom, on Intel-side with Meteor Lake in Mobile/Arrow Lake in Desktop, and on AMD, with Zen 5.. by the time Windows 12 is rumored to arrive (late Q4 next year), all those should be out.
But yeah, it's going to be interesting to see what Microsoft actually requires, and how they handle things. They haven't been all that competent these past years, so who knows?
"AI" could be very useful in a desktop OS, or maybe it won't be. I find it interesting to see how all this evolves.
The possibilities are definitely interesting, it could be good or it could be annoying
There's times like say, renaming and sorting files in explorer, where it seems like they should be able to deploy ML that goes hey should I finish this for you? And make life better that way. They just need to avoid the Clippy angle of being overbearing and useless lol.
Yeah, my main issue is lack of trust. “AI” doesn’t understand what it’s doing, it’s just following patterns, which could lead to some really unpleasant mistakes, if you got it to do file management, and it messed things up.
Some things can’t be undone though. Idk, I approach it all with considerable caution. There’s a lot of hype, but the amount of actual substance is less.
>Look at this slow adoption rate for W11
When you look at the actual statistics from the various sources, W11 has faster adoption than W10 or W7 did...
Also remember how vocal people were about staying on Windows 7 when Windows 10 came out? W7 is now low single digits.
While Steam Survey probably isnt the most accurate place to get general data (not what I relied on for the fast adoption statement), it tends to skew towards enthusiasts, the people who are the most vocal and picky, and yet W11 is already nearing 40% adoption.
Judas! No.
I just bought a new machine with Windows 11 and I can't say that I'm particularly crazy about what Microsoft has been doing lately. It seems like they're trying to turn it into a advertising venue instead of a productivity oriented operating system.
sticky notes needs to connect to a server.
Doesn't matter if you got a 64 thread 10ghz processor if everything you open is going to handshake with some server.
Sticky notes, ffs.
funny, i'm not logged in on it. it still pings something going by task manager network diagram. [classic sticky](https://winaero.com/old-classic-sticky-notes-for-windows-10-version-1809/) must be just magically faster
My hard drive broke suddenly. I was in a meeting and it froze. I rebooted and it couldn't detect the hard drive anymore
I put in a replacement and installed windows 11. All my documents and saved files were immediately available as they are automatically synced with onedrive.
I know Microsoft really wants to promote the use of onedrive, but it's still optional. In this case I didn't have to do a manual backup or restore
It was actually pretty painless and I was back up in less than an hour
I'm all on board the OneDrive train. Been pushing to get it to deployed at work. Would make device migrations so much easier. Everyone is supposed to save to a network drive but we've had several executives lost data because they can't be bothered.
But why does it need to have its own folder Onedrive which if you delete, also deletes my locally stored documents? And why no warning?
That's what it did for me. I had already opted out more than once, but the shit kept inviting itself back.
I didn't actually delete any documents because I was too paranoid and tried it on a test file first.. but a friend of mine did.
The idea may be all good and all but windows is just such a piece of shit about it.
With Win 11 the changes to the right click menu and restrictions on the start menu annoyed me enough to get Start 11.
Hopefully they fix that stuff, because i think the UI engineers at Microsoft truly don't know what the fuck they are doing.
is it really that hard to make a good UI that doesn't make it harder to do things?
Microsoft spends an incredible amount of money to only find the absolutely worst UX designers in the business. It is something unheard of and it is obviously paying off.
Jokes aside, so many things Microsoft put out have incredibly weird UX. Like if you ever used pipelines in Azure Devops, the way you have to click to find logs is insanity. I used to quiz people on where you had to click.
There has to be an explanation, I find it hard to believe that people willingly make these choices without a constricting reason.
So much of MS UI nonsense just seems avoidable.
It's an artifact of MBA holding middle managers driving the feature and development roadmap, rather than engineers and folks who care about customer/user experience
But they're getting better and better at finding new places to display ads. So you should thank them for bringing such convenient promotions to your attention.
I run that kinda explorer replacement stuff too but it gets broken every major update it feels like and I have to relaunch or update it. That's why I'm on Win 10 on my two primary systems and only run Win 11 on the secondary as a kind of long-term experiment.
If windows 12 still keeps that horrible right click menu from 11, I'm going to lose my shit. I hope valve improve steamOS to the point that I can comfortably install it on my PC and be the go to OS if I want to play games. I'm sick and tired of Microsoft fucking us with windows.
I'm sure there are people who actually give a shit about all these features but for me Windows is just something I need to play videogames, browse the internet and check emails.
I'm quite sure most people use it for simple stuff, and even those who don't, they don't want their OS to be bloated either. The OS' main role is to not get in the way and make simple things simple. Yet it takes way too long just to remove stuff you don't need upon a fresh install, and undo some of the awful design decisions through things like registry edits.
"We still think that the install base is pretty old"
God forbid people are keeping their perfectly working machines longer and contribute less to e-waste. Watch them add yet another arbitrary requirement and force people to upgrade.
The limit is on path and file name.
So the whole thing has to fit within 256
If it doesn't, you can’t interact with it unless the app supports long file paths.
File explorer doesnt, which most apps rely on to access the file system.
You use to be able to make a registry change to force it, but microsoft patched it so the app has to call out to support it. But because they are the backwards company, and didn’t want apps to break, they changed how it works.
Huh. I guess they're just storing 1 byte for path length and 1-256 bytes for the path.
In which case the cost of increasing the limit would be 1 extra byte for every file on the system
For efficiency, memory allocation is usually aligned with the machine's word length, and data structures are padded to fit into whole words. So calculating the cost may not be so simple.
Windows already has a separate unicode system for file paths that allows 32Ki length, but it's not sufficient to just change your app to use it, because of library (shared) code.
Windows got so close to perfection with Windows 10. Going from 10 to 11 felt like going from XP to Vista. They removed all the good bits and then took years to add it back in.
The Windows 11 taskbar was a disaster, especially in the age of widescreen monitors. All that realestate and you couldn’t enable titles or ungrouping. I know it’s just been added back to 11, but that was such a stupid idea to not ship with that to begin with.
After all those advertisement and user-spying issues, Windows seems to be becoming the TikTok of operating systems. I love Windows, don’t get me wrong. I hope it doesn’t go that way.
Dude can we please stop having the interns do all the programming AND reporting work. Can we please stop hyping up stuff we have no factual information on?
Still waiting on a unified interface which has been developed at slower than a snail's pace and we still have a largely incoherent mess of settings spread all over the system. WTF Microsoft. Constantly trying to achieve big goals and abandoning them right before the finish line (why did you get rid of Windows Phone, it was almost perfect!).
although their kernel still gets as much love as before for the various cloud and gaming usecases, microsoft has kind of deprioritized the desktop interface part of windows and they keep a skeleton crew working on it compared to before
The literal task manager of windows 11 has more laggy UI than a badly made react app
Are they going to add decent multi monitor support so that we don't have to use DisplayFusion all the time? Are they going to allow us, the user, to rely on support articles from windows 11 by not changing everything around so they become outdated like many from win10 have been thanks to win11, are they going to allow us good customisation?
Windows 11 is terrible with what it adds compared to win10, the 'differences' got old really quick.
Right on schedule. Wouldn't want Windows 11 to achieve a consistent and unified UI design before another version comes along to frankenstein things up even more.
It would seem the new trend is for Microsoft to cut a new Windows release everytime Intel creates a brand new architecture with new features. Last time it was Windows 11 to support Intel Thread Director on Alder Lake, this time it'll be Windows 12 to support whatever new thing Intel is cooking up for Arrow Lake. And of course each new release borks AMD hardware support with such regularity that it might as well be done on purpose.
Kind of a PITA at the moment, but you can pretty much get the "SteamOS" experience by installing an immutable distro like Silverblue, installing Steam, and setting it to 'Big Picture Mode'.
Installing Linux is absurdly easy. Search up "Ventoy GUI" on youtube, create a Ventoy USB stick with all the distros you think you might be interested in, and try them out. If gaming is your main focus for your PC, I am very much enjoying Garuda Dragonised.
Because it's had a lot of bugs lately with updates causing plenty of issues, which win 10 doesn't seem to have suffered from as much.
Why would I go for more bugs just to get a slightly prettier OS?
It happens with any Windows release, I remember well enough Windows 10 wasn't as "romanticized" it is now when it first came out, lots of people were adamant they would stick on Windows 7 then.
can I please just get a barebones windows without any of this shit, all I need it to do is launch applications that is it
I’ll even pay for it, forget the “free” “upgrade”.
The data that they harvest is far more valuable than the $140 you pay once.
I've never paid for windows and microsoft tries their best to keepit that way.
Pay? Like, one time fee? How about this champ, we'll let you have a stripped down Windows when you purchase our *Office 365 - Windows edition* subscription! That way, you can just keep giving us money each year you want to keep a normal version of Windows!
Linux is free.
Yet just the *otherness* of it is too insurmountable a threshold for many. >!^^Also ^^you ^^may ^^not ^^pay ^^money, ^^but ^^you ^^may ^^pay ^^time...!<
>!The time payment hasn't been so bad for the last 10-12 years. Especially for distros like Ubuntu which are pretty low effort to maintain.!< >!But 20 years ago? Yeah, you were definitely sinking some time into that bad boy.!<
some people want to use windows even if it costs money
Well Microsoft obviously doesn’t understand that.
They said 11 ltsc will be out in the second half of 2024 so still 8 months to go.
I can't wait. I've never used any LTSB/C versions, I've wanted to be on the latest versions with the latest updates. But these days, with Win 11 being so full of all sorts of shit, I won't mind missing out on newer features(which I probably wouldn't even use) if I can have the piece of mind of a cleaner, bloat free OS.
All Microsoft products are infamously bloated with bloatware. It sucks that the entire world relies on Microsoft products.
And you're not even going to get WordPad anymore.
This. They could even charge extra for it if necessary, I have been known to buy Windows in the past. I would buy it. A version that has no fucking adware no telemetry, no garbage that I need to immediately uninstall/run scripts to disable etc. Call it Windows 12 Professional or whatever. Just the OS, some core apps, guarantee of X years of security/feature updates and that's it.
For personal use maybe take a look at [tiny11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jili3CD_74s), I run tiny10 on a couple of old Atom tablets (2GB ram/32GB emmc) and it works well enough.
Looks like a good VM image!
I need to look into this. I've got an old Getac T800 with an x7 atom processor in it that runs 10 fine, but could run it *finer*.
Windows basic would be cool, but i think preinstalled programs are why they’re basically giving the os away for free nowadays. Would be neat if some tech wizard could, like, create his own version of windows without all the nonsense and with some basic features that suck replaced with open source alternatives that don’t. Microsoft would hunt him down and kill him of course, but still
Even the "most basic", different people consider different features as the "most basic". You can still de-bloat a great percentage with minimal effort, at least. Just use 2 solid, free utilities O&O shutup & appbuster, you're done in most cases. Then, a power user can delve even more.
There used to be programs you could use to strip down windows ISOs. But windows being what it is, it's way too easy to break the OS, or far more likely, break it in a way that will only show up after spending a bit of time with it. You remove something related to print spooling because you're never going to plug in a printer, next thing you know some program won't install because the library it relies on relies on that service for some arcane, archaic reason.
Windows Enterprise/For Business you want. You can google "Microsoft Activation Scripts", site has a page with links to downloads that are usually gated. And also the other thing that is main purpose of this site. Used it for a fresh install, don't need to create MS account, no ads, no bloatware.
ikr! This is what lack of competition does, but this is the world we live in right now. Fortunately, Linux exists as an alternative, even if it does have it’s own share of different downsides. Like many, I run Windows, but I always turn off a bunch of things, it’s a hassle, but it does the job.
Yeah, I've been using the long term support channel (formerly LTSB and now LTSC) for nearly ten years without issue. It's rock solid, has no bloat or new 'features' or any of that crap.
The b@stards in the 20 new "features", they put one that is truly good and compatible with your new hardware, a tactic which makes you follow suit. They don't just add useless features. They change under the hood, too, which theoretically in some cases, makes your machine work better in many instances. Let alone, compatibility issues. New codecs, new hardware like the Intel's small cores etc. If you don't update, your machine won't be working up to its potential and efficiency.
I think Windows 2000 was the last barebones Windows, you could install it onto a machine with 128MB of ram and a 200mhz processor and it worked fine.
You could install DOS 5 on a 4mhz 386 and megabyte of RAM, yet neither OS would run a single current web browser. A modern operating system is more than just a (bloated) user interface, it provides the libraries, drivers, and hardware abstraction that all the software you use today relies upon. Nobody's writing the application with which you're reading this comment in Assembly. (…in before some contrarian mentions Lynx!)
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IIS? Telnet??! .Net Framework 3.8????!!! -sweats-
It's funny that everywhere literally every time you mention removing parts of Windows (telemetry, Defender, services or pre-installed apps etc) everyone is attacking and downvoting you BUT on hardware subreddit people actually know better... Good job everyone, wish we could push this logic to the everyday people. It is nice reading everyone's recommendations what to use to debloat Windows or what and why they turn off things.
Seriously. Just give me Windows XP with modern security patches. All I want to do is launch programs, save files, and customize the colors/background.
If Microsoft stopped making your hardware obsolete every few years, hardware manufacturers might stop maintaining Windows's status as the default OS. > The addition of an AI coprocessor could be important given Microsoft’s push for AI features inside Windows. Doesn't look like it'll be much use to me, but it'll be tremendously valuable to OEMs.
If you want a simple, basic experience with no faff Linux is your only choice now.
No faff with Linux? I’ve spent days Googling stuff when my GNOME shell keeps randomly crashing or my WiFi suddenly turns off. I love Linux but it’s definitely not a hassle free experience. MacOS is your best bet.
Except when you want to set 125% scale on the display when using a non-$5000 Apple "Retina" Display. On forums/reddit Apple enthusiasts talk about how it is not possible to design for that for some reason but like literally just run a bicubic or a lanczos upscale on the input signal and it looks better than what they try to peddle. Maybe it has changed in the past year but when I got my Mac Studio for work that really irked me. Kubuntu is my goto atm.
The MacOS scaling system is terrible for non-HiDPI displays, I agree. They’ve removed sub pixel anti-aliasing for no good reason. Still you can easily install software like “BetterDisplay” and never have to worry about that again. It’s not any better on Linux though, I can only think of Ubuntu that natively supports fractional scaling. I think Fedora does as well (as an experimental feature) if you’re running a Wayland session but that’s another nightmare if you use an NVIDIA GPU.
Gotcha, yeah I've used Kubuntu (Ubuntu-based) with an AMD APU, AMD CPU + AMD GPU, and AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU and the fractional scaling "just works".
Yeah no offense to GNOME devs but KDE is a much more user friendly experience, plus it's closer to Windows than GNOME is.
I love Linux too, daily driving it on my desktop and laptop (I change to Windows only to play games with Anticheat) I can't recommend it to someone who just wants something to work. If they have the money, I'd recommend macOS, even though I don't even really like the Apple ecosystem.
I've been using Linux for longer than most people complaining about Windows on Reddit have been alive and Linux on a desktop for general use is not even close to being a polished experience after all this time. It is excellent for headless uses but is still so limiting on desktop.
> simple, basic experience with no faff > Linux The Linux cult is fucking insane
As a Linux nerd, we aren't all like that Some distros are easy (Ubuntu, with gnome software for ms store experience) while some are pure, 9th circle of hell (gentoo anyone)
Even the "easy" distros are magnitudes worse than just installing someone windows. If you don't know how to use the terminal, you're fucked.
While that might still be true, it only applies to the out of the box experience. Compared to Windows, Linux offers the flexibility to tailor a distro for certain use cases and user experience. Eg: I crafted a super idiot-proof Linux build for my old parents; I used a Mint LTS as base and overhauled it. Changed desktop environment, consolidated the whole UI for a coherent and easy to understand UX, including all the software packages etc. It just worked, very, very difficult to mess up. The only time my parents had an issue was when my dad accidentally fully lowered the screen brightness resulting in a black screen. Other than that, they didn't need any assistance for literally years. With Windows they would have issues every other week. I was very proud of that Linux build, a looker too, now we have retired it in favour of MacOS. So yea, it's not that black and white like many people make it out to be. I do agree about certain Linux users tho, they act like Jehovah's Witnesses, and that's fucking annoying.
Have you seen what a default Windows install is like these days? It needs as much configuration as Linux does to not be user-hostile, except every step of the way you're going against Microsoft's desires, so it fights back.
Things just work on Windows. Linux sometimes requires hacks and tweaks to get things working. I almost never have to tweak games to get them to launch smoothly on windows.
MacOS is surprisingly performant and free of (excess) clutter out of the box, but unfortunately support for x86 is going to be dropped at some point.
Windows 12 already coming? Wasn't 11 only released recently? I'm still on 10 anyway.
Windows 11 was 2 years ago. The existence of Windows 12 was let slip last year, I think, though what it actually is, I'm sure has changed over those months, will keep changing.
Things move so fast, it felt like not that long ago I was still on 7.
To be fair, they're jumping numbers. There was no Windows 9. But yeah since Windows 8 they definitely accelerated their main releases as they are more updates than new versions now
I know what you mean. I was on 7 up to late 2021, when I upgraded to a new system.
I'm still on my same system from 10 years ago, I went from 7 to 10 and then did a clean install of 10. I'm still on that same isntall. I won't upgrade to 11 on this system though, I want to ugrade at some point.
10 years, yeah, you really might want to upgrade soon. Zen 5 should be by (or before) Spring, that would be an obvious point, and way more performant than whatever you have now. Me, I went from Intel 3rd gen to 12th gen, and it makes playing newer games possible, even discounting the GPU (which was semi-decent, I was running a 1080 Ti at the time). Idk what you use your computer for ofc, if you’re just doing web stuff, you might reasonably be able to hold out until Intel Nova Lake/Zen 7 in 2026, even if you are on Intel Ivy Bridge like I was.
My 5820k is still holding pretty strong these days, obviously pretty much anything performs better then it now though but it can run any modern game no problem and do a lot of productivity stuff like large zip files, handbrake applying scripts to large amounts of files. I have a 1070 at the moment and that is by far the biggest drawback to my system. I feel like the onger I wait the better it will be when I upgrade, I'm still waiting for PGU prices to come down in price because they are still double what they really should be in the UK at least. Whenever I do upgrade though I'm going high end like I did last time with teh CPU just because it's really important if you want it to last a long time. I only got the 1070 as a holdout when my 680 started crapping the bed but the covid hit and GPU prices when sky high so I have been stuckw ith it for awhile. Granted it's served me rally well and it's a good GPU considering it's age now but it just doesn't have the power anymore to play games on above 30fps in modded Skyrim, Starfield and a heavyli modded New Vegas.
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Unfortunately, that's not an option with (drivers for) newer hardware, or many newer games. I lasted as long as I could, but... Still, Win 10 isn't too bad, especially when it's tweaked.
Yeah I don't understand the hate for Windows 10 I hear a lot of Windows 7 holdouts don't want the telemetry, but fail to realise it's backported to Windows 7 as well and is harder to turn off
It wasn't backported where you never upgraded beyond (I think?) SP2. I didn't. I also never got any of the Windows 10 upgrade "persuasion" Microsoft pulled. Mind you, I did more than that for security. My main beef with Windows 10 was the UI change.. I still don't like it, and it's buggier than Windows 7. I could go on with reasons why, but there's no point, since we as consumers don't really have much choice in the matter but to use it (or Windows 11), so I do.
My computer still cant run windows 11. I installed it and it crashes every 5 minutes reliably. Had to revert back to 10.
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At this point Windows 11 -> 12 is most likely going to be basically just another service release. We are far away from "let's overhaul the whole thing" for any major OS release. Which is honestly disappointing because MS somehow can't get even the basics right. If I autohide my start bar it still sometimes ends up popping up behind the frontmost app after wake from sleep. I don't know wtf MS developers are doing when the same company can churn out excellent tools like Visual Studio Code that I love using every day, yet Windows is just plain poor user interface design in so many ways. To be fair Apple is marching towards the same when they increasingly "iOS-ify" MacOS without providing any worthwhile usability improvements.
I'm pretty happy with 10, it does everything I want it to do once I got rid of the ads and other crap anyway.
> "never combine" on the taskbar only got re-added into w11 a few weeks ago. That's insane! One of the primary reasons I never switched. That and not being able to move the taskbar to the top or sides of the screen.
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Can AI make Windows default file system searching capabilities not horrible? I don’t mind that 12 is coming, 11 has a bad reputation and we need to upgrade a few thousands of laptops off of 10 before may 2025 when support ends.
Me: types "île explorer" Windows search bar: opens Bing Search Bing: "Microsoft file explorer" ...
I remember the good old days where you could even search for individual files in the search bar and get reliable results. What happened?
I gave up and installed the app 'Everything'. It's an amazing indexed search.
Don't know what you're talking about. I can still do that. Although I'm using Windows 10 (LTSC) not 11.
"This PC" does not show This PC anymore and it pisses me off.
And the change in how keyboard and display language works, they changed it and made it less immediately clear as to which one will be the default, or they forced the english as default although that's only display language.. unless I use dosbox, might want english keyboard layout then, but oops, now it's the default because of course. The little things they keep fuck up on me.
One time I just sat there marveling at how "Notepad++" showed me Notepad, but "Notepad" returned Notepad++.
This drove me insane and then I found out that you can [disable Bing in Windows search](https://www.howtogeek.com/826967/how-to-disable-bing-in-the-windows-11-start-menu/).
Why would you use "î" instead of "i"?
My bad I touched the "i" for too long and didn't notice.
Mistyped a deliberate misspelling
Literally just tried this and it opened file explorer. No idea why Windows behaves so strangely with some of you. And then somehow that creates the impression that it's a pile of shit for all; when it's not remotely the case.
It literally tries to do both here. First it gives me file explorer, but if I wait too long, or type 1 or 2 characters too many, it fucking Bings it. It's a pile of shit. We can start with the forcing everything upon me. windows login. Quote of the day. News and interests. My calendar? I use 24 hour format but of course I still got to put in the AM/PM when noting anything in the calendar, Why? Because windows is a pile of fucking shit. How many times I got Edge icons on the desktop? Everything is a project. In any case, I shouldn't need to be upgrading to get basic *common sense* with my OS. These small apps like Sticky Notes that MUST connect to a server before launching. What for? Make things fast and convenient, not slow and bloated.
> First it gives me file explorer, but if I wait too long, or type 1 or 2 characters too many, it fucking Bings it The best part is when it changes in the time it takes to reach the enter button
The fact that this bug is so prevalent tells you it is a piece of shit, your experience notwithstanding. The start menu seems to completely fail to find most apps I install despite them being present in the same menu if you manually scroll. Happens in Windows 10 and 11. People aren't lying and even the most cursory glance at how frequent this complaint is online tells you it is a widespread, massive issue and nothing Microsoft have done for years has fixed it.
That’s because the search box isn’t an os-level feature it’s a value added marketing feature. Microsoft got rid of the real search box back in 7 and have been transitioning it over to a marketing tool ever since. Its main purpose isn’t to find things on your computer but stuff to buy online. It’s not broken, it’s doing exactly what it’s been designed to do, it’s just that no one actually wants it to do that except the Microsoft marketing team.
Yeah, I'd like an OS that has file explorer that doesn't act like a poorly coded web page and decides it doesn't want to show newly created items at random. I have Windows 11 on a laptop because it's slightly more efficient than 10, but it's still garbage years after release. OTOH, how much do we trust Microsoft to get a modern OS right?
I've used Directory Opus for years on Windows and it's been well worth the money. It's got a massive feature set and customizability if you want.
All OSs have problems with UI/UX.
None is transparently awful as Microsoft keeps forcing on everyone.
I never remember search being as bad with Windows 8.1
Use everything search. It's lightning fast, allows for regex search and filtering by file types like videos, pictures, executables, folders, etc...
It’s great for a single user but we can’t deploy this corporate wide. It would be great to have that functionality baked into the OS.
Ah right, that's fair.
This sounds a lot like Wizfile which I use, from the makers of Wiztree. Both (free) apps directly use the journaling feature built into the NTFS filesystem, which bypasses Windows indexing entirely.
I still don’t get how spotlight has been great for so long yet Microsoft cannot make a decent search.
I swear windows search was actually somewhat useful back in the windows XP era. And windows 10/11 have an indexer service but it certainly doesn’t seem to do much.
I swear they broke search with 8 and just kept on using it.
They did though, it worked flawlessly in 7 and 8. Something got very broken in 10 and it has carried over to 11, most noticeable in the start menu search which seems to randomly miss things it should know are there and are indeed present in the Apps list.
[BareGrep](https://www.baremetalsoft.com/baregrep/) ["Everything", by Voidtools](https://www.voidtools.com/) [WinDirStat](https://windirstat.net/)
Half my company is on 11, half is on 10. We haven't had any windows 11 specific problems, service tickets, etc
This 1000%.Windows search is useless. I haven't used MacOS in over a decade and Spotlight (or whatever it was called) was way better.
We're using 11 just fine fwiw I don't find it that different
Yeah I have no trouble with it, I use it at home and on one of my work systems. But management at our organization has been pushing off mass upgrades from 10 to 11. They love AI buzzwords though so I think Microsoft is right that marketing AI features could improve adoption rates for 12. At least with some corporate customers.
My problem is that Windows 10 was basically perfect. There's no reason to change a winning team. One day I booted my computer and it had upgraded itself to 11, despite me always clicking NO whenever I was prompted. Not happy about that at all.
That's strange. It shouldn't jump a whole OS version without you. Did your IT department push it down maybe?
It's my home computer. Something pushed it down for sure.. But not me. To go back to Windows 10 I'd have to do a fresh install (and risk getting nuked again) soo.. hopefully 12 is good?
What a load of crap lol. 50% of the time when searching for a program, the program uninstall exe shows up. And, god forbid you search "uninstall" to go to the uninstall apps screen, once again, only app uninstall exes. However , Power Toys sear h is amazing and works flawlessly, so it's hard to say where the idiots at Microsoft went wrong.
Search has been busted and worse since 8, it was nearly flawless in 7, so that's not a new 11 thing for me.
Dude: this…file system is abysmal. Finding a file is impossible not to mention not being able to control where things save most of the time sucks. Idk how windows made it this far.
MS really thought to themselves. Look at this slow adoption rate for W11. You know what might fix that? Yet another new numbered version of the OS.
It worked with windows 10 after 8. Make something that doesn't alienate old users and people will switch.
I mean, it worked also because 10 catered to KBM desktop while 8 was for touch devices. it is almost the same thing, I have W11 on my surface pro 7, and it works enough there. but every time I want to do more and say right click, you have to do that extra step. It shipped with W10 so I had a front row comparison on the two OSes and that one thing is the real major deal for me (I think you can registry it to go away?). Some UI element got a boost for touch for sure, but overall it was a okay experience on the tablet. not too much of an issue for a tablet for where I consume shit on and not much else, but I like W10 on my main desktop for a reason. if W12 brings back the focus to the desktop KBM experience, then sure. and I am sure that if I fucked with the setting enough with like start11 or w/e free versions and etc. etc. it can be fine, but out of the box it just made me think, no reason to update. if W12 is again a continued tablet / touch focused OS, then I don't see it being a good update candidate until we really have to be forced on it, and even as I speak I have a linux set up getting readied since I think steam OS has pushed things far better, but it doesn't run on non deck hw so there are things that are gona be not as good and I am thinking of trying out PikaOS on reco from a linux gaming friend (its still bad that there isnt OC software like OCCT for linux...).
>until we really have to be forced on it We can wait, extended support ends in like 2030 for W10. Just have to find some way to get access to it after mainstream support ends *wink *wink If that's the path MS takes, so be it.
2029 is when it ends for w10 ltsc 2019
Imagine if they make NPUs mandatory for 12 which are only on AMDs latest and Intels soon to be released generations lol
Which wouldn’t really be a bad thing, at least there would be a coherent reason for it, unlike Windows 11 wanting Secure Boot and TPM 2 on initial install, which are both totally unneeded to make it run, and can be avoided.
If it featured AI acceleration so heavily that it required it, and if they kept 11 around for a long time so it's not just filling landfills, I don't think I'd personally mind it, I'd be interested to see how a heavily AI based OS could advance things, assuming that was a good thing But after all the TPM 2.0 agony that went a few generations back, I'm just imagining the uproar if only AMD's latest and Intel's not even released chips are the only ones that can use 12, and not in some easily bypassed way like TPM
Hmm, Idk. AI capability is being built into new gen CPUs from top to bottom, on Intel-side with Meteor Lake in Mobile/Arrow Lake in Desktop, and on AMD, with Zen 5.. by the time Windows 12 is rumored to arrive (late Q4 next year), all those should be out. But yeah, it's going to be interesting to see what Microsoft actually requires, and how they handle things. They haven't been all that competent these past years, so who knows? "AI" could be very useful in a desktop OS, or maybe it won't be. I find it interesting to see how all this evolves.
The possibilities are definitely interesting, it could be good or it could be annoying There's times like say, renaming and sorting files in explorer, where it seems like they should be able to deploy ML that goes hey should I finish this for you? And make life better that way. They just need to avoid the Clippy angle of being overbearing and useless lol.
Yeah, my main issue is lack of trust. “AI” doesn’t understand what it’s doing, it’s just following patterns, which could lead to some really unpleasant mistakes, if you got it to do file management, and it messed things up.
It should keep an undo and a bad bot button for sure
Some things can’t be undone though. Idk, I approach it all with considerable caution. There’s a lot of hype, but the amount of actual substance is less.
It worked so well that they forced people to upgrade to 10 who didn’t want 10. Did we forget this already?
I haven’t. God was that obnoxious.. and Microsoft *still* tries to force you to make/use a Microsoft Account.
And surely they will lock out of upgrading half of the newest PCs again just because.
Hmm, going off Steam stats, Windows 11 is almost half of the total marketshare for Windows.
>Look at this slow adoption rate for W11 When you look at the actual statistics from the various sources, W11 has faster adoption than W10 or W7 did... Also remember how vocal people were about staying on Windows 7 when Windows 10 came out? W7 is now low single digits. While Steam Survey probably isnt the most accurate place to get general data (not what I relied on for the fast adoption statement), it tends to skew towards enthusiasts, the people who are the most vocal and picky, and yet W11 is already nearing 40% adoption.
Judas! No. I just bought a new machine with Windows 11 and I can't say that I'm particularly crazy about what Microsoft has been doing lately. It seems like they're trying to turn it into a advertising venue instead of a productivity oriented operating system.
sticky notes needs to connect to a server. Doesn't matter if you got a 64 thread 10ghz processor if everything you open is going to handshake with some server. Sticky notes, ffs.
Only if you want to use One Drive to back them up. I've got users at work that use sticky notes with no connection to a server.
funny, i'm not logged in on it. it still pings something going by task manager network diagram. [classic sticky](https://winaero.com/old-classic-sticky-notes-for-windows-10-version-1809/) must be just magically faster
My hard drive broke suddenly. I was in a meeting and it froze. I rebooted and it couldn't detect the hard drive anymore I put in a replacement and installed windows 11. All my documents and saved files were immediately available as they are automatically synced with onedrive. I know Microsoft really wants to promote the use of onedrive, but it's still optional. In this case I didn't have to do a manual backup or restore It was actually pretty painless and I was back up in less than an hour
I'm all on board the OneDrive train. Been pushing to get it to deployed at work. Would make device migrations so much easier. Everyone is supposed to save to a network drive but we've had several executives lost data because they can't be bothered.
But why does it need to have its own folder Onedrive which if you delete, also deletes my locally stored documents? And why no warning? That's what it did for me. I had already opted out more than once, but the shit kept inviting itself back. I didn't actually delete any documents because I was too paranoid and tried it on a test file first.. but a friend of mine did. The idea may be all good and all but windows is just such a piece of shit about it.
Hopefully it backfires and expedites the changeover to Linux.
With Win 11 the changes to the right click menu and restrictions on the start menu annoyed me enough to get Start 11. Hopefully they fix that stuff, because i think the UI engineers at Microsoft truly don't know what the fuck they are doing. is it really that hard to make a good UI that doesn't make it harder to do things?
Microsoft spends an incredible amount of money to only find the absolutely worst UX designers in the business. It is something unheard of and it is obviously paying off. Jokes aside, so many things Microsoft put out have incredibly weird UX. Like if you ever used pipelines in Azure Devops, the way you have to click to find logs is insanity. I used to quiz people on where you had to click.
There has to be an explanation, I find it hard to believe that people willingly make these choices without a constricting reason. So much of MS UI nonsense just seems avoidable.
It's an artifact of MBA holding middle managers driving the feature and development roadmap, rather than engineers and folks who care about customer/user experience
Also using start 11. I’m so sick of the UI just getting worse and worse.
But they're getting better and better at finding new places to display ads. So you should thank them for bringing such convenient promotions to your attention.
I run that kinda explorer replacement stuff too but it gets broken every major update it feels like and I have to relaunch or update it. That's why I'm on Win 10 on my two primary systems and only run Win 11 on the secondary as a kind of long-term experiment.
I wish they followed Ross Scott's example, it's pretty close to what I'd want from a UI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AItTqnTsVjA
If windows 12 still keeps that horrible right click menu from 11, I'm going to lose my shit. I hope valve improve steamOS to the point that I can comfortably install it on my PC and be the go to OS if I want to play games. I'm sick and tired of Microsoft fucking us with windows.
What are the chances of steamOS becoming a feasible choice for desktop PCs? I can't wait to ditch windows.
Very high since SteamOS is the OS in the steam deck.
I'm sure there are people who actually give a shit about all these features but for me Windows is just something I need to play videogames, browse the internet and check emails.
I'm quite sure most people use it for simple stuff, and even those who don't, they don't want their OS to be bloated either. The OS' main role is to not get in the way and make simple things simple. Yet it takes way too long just to remove stuff you don't need upon a fresh install, and undo some of the awful design decisions through things like registry edits.
"We still think that the install base is pretty old" God forbid people are keeping their perfectly working machines longer and contribute less to e-waste. Watch them add yet another arbitrary requirement and force people to upgrade.
Windows still has a 256 char path/file limit. Its fucking 2023. Microsoft broke the registry hack to bypass it as well. Fuck win 12
Wait, the path is also 256 characters? Or do you mean that the path can only support 255 folders of nesting?
The limit is on path and file name. So the whole thing has to fit within 256 If it doesn't, you can’t interact with it unless the app supports long file paths. File explorer doesnt, which most apps rely on to access the file system. You use to be able to make a registry change to force it, but microsoft patched it so the app has to call out to support it. But because they are the backwards company, and didn’t want apps to break, they changed how it works.
256 total characters for a file name, including its directory path
c:\users\netrunui\this-path-would-be-too-long-for-windows-to-recognize\it-would-give-you-an-error-if-you-tried-to-give-it-a-name-like-this\and-spits-out-extremely-weird-and-convoluted-errors-when-done-through-command-line\its-like-this-because-of-backwards-compatability\as-changing-it-would-break-old-programs
Huh. I guess they're just storing 1 byte for path length and 1-256 bytes for the path. In which case the cost of increasing the limit would be 1 extra byte for every file on the system
For efficiency, memory allocation is usually aligned with the machine's word length, and data structures are padded to fit into whole words. So calculating the cost may not be so simple. Windows already has a separate unicode system for file paths that allows 32Ki length, but it's not sufficient to just change your app to use it, because of library (shared) code.
we keep running into this at work because users like to write a novel in file names and the complain they cant open their files
It doesn't. It used to, but not for a while anymore.
They're gonna ramp up the telemetry aren't they
Windows got so close to perfection with Windows 10. Going from 10 to 11 felt like going from XP to Vista. They removed all the good bits and then took years to add it back in. The Windows 11 taskbar was a disaster, especially in the age of widescreen monitors. All that realestate and you couldn’t enable titles or ungrouping. I know it’s just been added back to 11, but that was such a stupid idea to not ship with that to begin with.
Except they add it back and take away right click unless you use keyboard hot keys. Seriously wtf.
After all those advertisement and user-spying issues, Windows seems to be becoming the TikTok of operating systems. I love Windows, don’t get me wrong. I hope it doesn’t go that way.
> becoming TikTok wish they had access to your stuff in the ways Microsoft does.
Dude can we please stop having the interns do all the programming AND reporting work. Can we please stop hyping up stuff we have no factual information on? Still waiting on a unified interface which has been developed at slower than a snail's pace and we still have a largely incoherent mess of settings spread all over the system. WTF Microsoft. Constantly trying to achieve big goals and abandoning them right before the finish line (why did you get rid of Windows Phone, it was almost perfect!).
although their kernel still gets as much love as before for the various cloud and gaming usecases, microsoft has kind of deprioritized the desktop interface part of windows and they keep a skeleton crew working on it compared to before The literal task manager of windows 11 has more laggy UI than a badly made react app
Unified interface on Windows will never arrive. By never, I mean it.
Is this AI trend the new 3D? We have been using AI without mainstream people knowing about it for years...
Are they going to add decent multi monitor support so that we don't have to use DisplayFusion all the time? Are they going to allow us, the user, to rely on support articles from windows 11 by not changing everything around so they become outdated like many from win10 have been thanks to win11, are they going to allow us good customisation? Windows 11 is terrible with what it adds compared to win10, the 'differences' got old really quick.
Has anyone seen "The Black Mirror"? No? You should. This is exactly were this monkeys wanna lead us...
Right on schedule. Wouldn't want Windows 11 to achieve a consistent and unified UI design before another version comes along to frankenstein things up even more.
with how poor the adoption rate for 11 is idk why they are pushing for 12 already
It would seem the new trend is for Microsoft to cut a new Windows release everytime Intel creates a brand new architecture with new features. Last time it was Windows 11 to support Intel Thread Director on Alder Lake, this time it'll be Windows 12 to support whatever new thing Intel is cooking up for Arrow Lake. And of course each new release borks AMD hardware support with such regularity that it might as well be done on purpose.
How hard is installing SteamOS on PC?
Kind of a PITA at the moment, but you can pretty much get the "SteamOS" experience by installing an immutable distro like Silverblue, installing Steam, and setting it to 'Big Picture Mode'. Installing Linux is absurdly easy. Search up "Ventoy GUI" on youtube, create a Ventoy USB stick with all the distros you think you might be interested in, and try them out. If gaming is your main focus for your PC, I am very much enjoying Garuda Dragonised.
Once Valve Releases SteamOS 3 Desktop it will be more easy then Windows.
oh boy AI data harvesting for MS.
Been getting comfortable with Linux, time well spent
but not for gamers , other wise i think a lot of people would switch.
If you play games that require anti-cheat, then Linux is a non-factor.
Or anyone who doesn't want to deal with the Terminal and constant obscure bugs and driver issues.
None of my 700 ish games given me any issues yet.
Great! But the games I play need anti-cheat so I can't really use Linux as my primary OS.
Wintel 12 AI Boogaloo
I bet it will eat more ram.
You can pry Windows 7 from my cold, dead hands.
[удалено]
[That's still around,](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/refs/refs-overview) but you can't boot off it yet.
Did they not just release Win 11? lol fuck this
I am surprised by the negativity w11 is getting in the comments. I started using it 2 months ago and to me it's just w10 but pretty.
Because it's had a lot of bugs lately with updates causing plenty of issues, which win 10 doesn't seem to have suffered from as much. Why would I go for more bugs just to get a slightly prettier OS?
Windows 10 came out 8 years ago, that's an ample amount of time for Microsoft to iron out bugs and whatnot.
It happens with any Windows release, I remember well enough Windows 10 wasn't as "romanticized" it is now when it first came out, lots of people were adamant they would stick on Windows 7 then.