Posted by jovial_cavalier 1 day ago
A friend of mine recently bought a very expensive laptop to do some gaming. I helped him set it up and god that was a horrible experience. For example, we could not get rid of LinkedIn and other crap Microsoft wanted to force on him. Disabling copilot and removing Office required registry surgery. And the damn fans were always running because of some unknown activity in the background, maybe Microsoft is moving into bitcoin mining business?
He eventually got fed up, installed Ubuntu 26.04 as an experiment and a week later still seems to enjoy the experience. Games run fine on steam and his laptop finally feels like his own.
Most surprisingly, Linux worked fine out of the box. Windows 11 on the other hand needed a bunch of PowerShell and registry hacks to be copy pasted from various sources before it was even remotely usable. It's funny how it felt as if Windows was the OS for nerds with too much free time on their hands while Ubuntu was created for ordinary people. And my god, Ubuntu feels so much more fluid on the same hardware. The difference is *huge*.
NVIDIA GPUs were infamous for doing this with nouveau on less ideally supported cards, for example.
And with a preinstalled Windows (tuned to the laptop) this behavior should not be observed at all.
It's been wonderful.
I'm running Ubuntu on a 9950x3d and 5090 and it is not slow. Games in Steam with Proton are buttery smooth.
One hiccup was I had to disable variable refresh rate because moving the cursor didn't "count" as a reason to update the screen, so moving the cursor on its own (rather than e.g. moving a window) looked choppy.
But a choppy mouse cursor isn't "slow".
Tip: if you have a performance problem, run Claude Code (or an AI agent of your choice) and ask it to investigate.
Everything, huge input delay in every interaction, clicking on anything, opening menus, typing, tabbing between windows, everything had 1-2s of delay.
>disable variable refresh rate
I think I tried this but dont recall, there were a few things related to monitor refresh I tried that probably included this
Without having to google whether it will, or what hardware to buy.
Without having to google some workaround or configure anything to get the most of it.
You should buy preinstalled the OS you want instead.
Microsoft took a more difficult path. They have close contact with OEMs, run certification programs etc. A massive apparatus to make it somewhat likely that hardware will ”just work”.
Both of these are valid models. I’d be happy to use either. I’m not very keen on doing this work myself though. I can buy a PC with Ubuntu but then it’s still hit and miss if I buy something new for it. There is no canonical store selling canonical gear like the Apple Store
A few years ago, I finally decided I'd had it with Windows and their crap and uninstalled it. If I game doesn't run on Linux, I don't play it. Simple as that.
I'm lucky in that a majority of games I play run fine on Linux, the only real game I'd love to play is Vermintide 2. My friends also run a mix of Linux and Windows and so we're fairly fine skipping games as a group if we can't play on Linux.
yes ive reached that point too.
There's at least one anti-cheat that "works" on Linux so they have options.
That said, Linux used to be a tough cookie because there were so little support for software people wanted to run and the alternatives didn't do it any favours, plus the barrage of problems you used to get installing it on a random machine was discouraging, at best. Nowadays your chances of running it well on a random machine is pretty damn good and getting the software you need is lot more feasible. But don't go YOLOing a linux install, see if meets your use cases. There is nothing wrong with waiting until it's good enough.
However in today's world if you expose an unpatched "anything" to the internet then it is very possible that it will be discovered and eventually used to (silently) do things you don't want. Think DDOS farms, illegal software distribution etc...
What is the middle ground? I don't think there is one. We need to have reliable, automatically updated OSes which don't suck and , much more importantly, run the applications we need.
That is definitely NOT Windows.
I just can't, gotta ask - what about c++ updates? What about integral os components that were migrated to the store and if you disable it, you won't get updates? What about defender updates (not definitions but app update) that won't get applied if you have another anti malware?
The thing I hate about windows updates is that microsoft can't even update all their own stuff with a single button.
edit: almost forgot - why is office not in windows update, and what the hell is wrong with teams and why it is seperate from office updates
Just updating windows is a complete and utter mess and every single Linux distro is 100x better
Since this isn't the Reddit comment section (I hear people here prefer a bit more elaboration and argumentative nuance with their $BEVERAGE), I feel compelled to add some of my own personal experience.
I don't think Windows can be fixed anymore. I think the choices Microsoft have been doing for _decades_ now, with only the _mechanisms_ coming and going, have become endemic to Windows, a part of its identity. Copilot, for example, is just another gadget Microsoft simply cannot not put in. In '95 is was Clippy, but the deliveries never stop, and frankly I feel like an old man that finally decided to kick a bad habit because I truly see now all the empty talk from Microsoft I've heard countless amount of times before, wrapped in different packaging, and that Windows is like it is _by design_ and that it's bad for my health (in a different way than Linux can ever be, I feel).
Ever since Windows '95 the addition of slop has been accelerating, admittedly Microsoft _were_ much different then, but it's the _curve_ I am referring to, not that they were always _as bad_. Frankly, the "churn" is insane now, I think it's one or the other adage I can't recall where "available operating system" fills "available resources" and Microsoft are there to prove it.
The problem is also they are experimenting on their users to no end. I don't mind being part of the "user experiment" for "user experience" but how many decades do they need to arrive at the same fundamental conclusions -- that people prefer less bloat, and fewer interruptions in their face? Occam's Razor tells me it's rather that Microsoft is pretending to care but their agenda is their own alone (surprise).
Just the other day I had to spend 2 hours trying to "fix" some very-background OneDrive update because I suppose I am sucker enough to use OneDrive -- one of the least liked of Microsoft products I've had the misfortune to use -- with Windows using my laptop as a BitCoin farm, wasting cycles in some infinite loop produced by what evokes comparisons to those monkeys with typewriters. Half a dozen Powershell commands and 3-4 reboots later the `wsappx.exe` process finally was healthy enough to idle. These things happen constantly to people everywhere and there's little Microsoft can or wants to do anything about. It's a cost they're willing their users to pay.
To stop rambling, one of these days -- summer vacation perhaps -- I will remove the blasted thing finally (after decades of using both Windows and Linux) and grit my teeth through Linux, which I have tried avoiding only because I am on a Thinkpad and there's always another tweak that's needed for the whole thing to work as well as Windows does on a _good_ day. To be clear, I prefer Linux by and large, it's just that I want to avoid spending weekends configuring sleep, power states, Trackpoint, full-disk encryption, the docking station, etc.
The fact I am going to do it anyway, just to rid myself of the Windows experience that's just been getting worse and worse, says it all really.
Microsoft's biggest and most consistent product is contempt for its users - consumers especially, but also business users.
When you understand that all of Microsoft's offerings are vectors for that contempt, the rest falls into place.
A user-centric Microsoft is an oxymoron. The company is literally incapable of it.
I'm not so sure that Windows is unfixable. It could probably be fixed, but doing that would require rebuilding every burned bridge back to its old standard, and probably then some, and that's something the relevant people aren't going to agree to do (since they were the ones who burned them).
Mandatory updates? Now they aren't any more.
Onedrive stole your files and deleted them? Now Onedrive is enabled/disabled on first setup.
Shitty start menu? Now you can pick which one you want, all the way back to the Windows 7 one.
Shitty right click menu? Now the old one is back.
All AI? Now there's a toggle on install to enable/disable it all.
Now settings menu sucks? Here's the old control panel back as standard.
Telemetry? How about no?
If MS did all of these things (and probably more), their trust level would rise skyhigh, since they'd be doing tangible things to fix the pain points we've all talked about. Now they've hit one point out of probably 50+, and many of the remaining ones are much harder to fix than updates being forced.
That's the one that really shocked me, and I haven't even experienced it for myself. I'm not normally that prone to excessive hyperbole, but that's about the most terrible thing I could ever conceive of an OS doing. All of the other stuff is a little annoying, but I could deal. But how in the hell could it ever be considered acceptable by anyone for your own OS to delete your files and move them to OneDrive or any other cloud service automatically? It's almost like ransomware, but the ransomware people will at least give you your files back for one flat payment. And the ransomware people at least know they're doing something nasty, and didn't try to integrate it as a default operating system feature. I guess they have better ethics than Microsoft!
It's just so obviously wrong, it's hard to even believe that it's a real thing. I don't think I could ever install an OS that even had a feature to do that at all, even if I could maybe temporarily turn it off with some scripts downloaded off the internet.
Obviously, Microsoft can't give people back their deleted Onedrive files, but they can make good on a promise that it will never happen again (given that their efforts are founded in reality and not marketing speak), and hide behind a shield of 'that wasn't our intention'. Same goes with most other things you could complain about Windows.
If you have no reason to believe that Windows will screw you over, since MS has course-corrected on all major points of contention, then why not stick around? (The answer is that MS may change course again, but for those who haven't jumped ship, I'm sure this will provide good enough reason to stick around. It's not like the ship isn't providing them any utility. They've stuck around this long for a reason.)
By now Windows, for me is more like a reality TV show than an OS.
Honestly, I can live with Windows 11 being a little slow, and I can deal with File Explorer issues. I can write my own tools to manage some of that, and PowerShell is simple enough for many tasks. Those parts do not bother me that much.
What bothers me is Copilot being pushed into the operating system experience itself. I wish it could simply be treated as an optional feature.
Windows is an operating system. An operating system is the foundational layer that governs the user’s work. Because of that, AI should be an opt-out assistant, not a premise that changes the default behavior of the system.
When I move from Windows 10 to Windows 11, Copilot feels like something that damages the user experience itself.
If Copilot were at the level of GPT or Claude, I probably would not complain as much. But I do not understand why the quality gap feels so large.
Why accept mediocrity when Microsoft has shown to be capable of producing something better than their current iteration of Windows? Whether you prefer Windows 2000 or XP or 7 or one of the server versions over 10/11, all of those were in many ways 'better' than 11.
> I can deal with File Explorer issues
Again, why? It is not as if those issues are the result of Microsoft adding something useable or worthwhile, they're just the result of MS adding even more ballast to an already overburdened system.
> I can write my own tools to manage some of that
Yes, you can, and...
> PowerShell is simple enough for many tasks
...so you're getting to experience the power of the shell like *nix-users have been espousing for more than half a century now. Welcome to the club and welcome to the CLI. Here we use words to communicate instead of pictures, we outgrew those once we left play school.
If you want to use Windows just use one of the previous versions as long as you can while preparing to move over to the greener Wine-yards in Linux-land. Unless there is a big shake-up within Microsoft - unlikely - it looks like Windows as an operating system is a dead-end street. It will be turned into a straight jacket where you will comply with whatever the current business plan dictates. Escape while you still can I'd say, there are many alternatives on offer.