Who is surprised?
As a small business, I need MS office & 2 other pieces of software that have no Linux versions. Rightly pissed off that I’ll have to upgrade my main machines to Win 11 by Oct 25.
I’m guessing those pieces of software won’t run in wine? Its pretty good these days.
I’ve never tried. Does it handle random applications or would they need to be on a list?
it will attempt anything. just search around for anyone else whose tried the app. odds are pretty good.
Have you looked into OnlyOffice. Nice office suite that saves in MS file extensions. Use it all the tjme
MS office PWA is nearly indentical to the desktop apps these days. I switched to linux where I use outlook and excel via pwa for work, and it’s been fine. My M$ centered workplace is actually setting up an option to use linux on their laptops soon, too. I can’t wait for that.
The web app is nowhere near as powerful as the desktop app. I need the desktop app for about 25% of my work.
Which one specifically? Outlook is identical, and excel is nearly the same. Excel is just missing a couple developer mode options like adding a checkbox to a cell, which were basically just gimmicky imo anyways.
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Or you just get it over with and just switch to Linux altogether
And yet - should you have to actively work against the design goals of OS installed on your hardware? It’s great that some folks have found a way to successfully disable it, but that doesn’t give MS a pass.
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Fair!
I never said otherwise.
Sorry for my assumption regarding your point in posting what you did. 🙂
“…can’t be uninstalled…”
Well sure it can, you just have to switch to Linux!
We can’t uninstall our own keylogger, sorry!
keylogging isn’t as bad as seeing EVERYTHING including visuals on screen
Not use Windows 11 you say? Install Linux you say?!
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I agree but technology hasn’t really been “ours” for a long time. Rooting, jailbreaking, and open source is the only way to take back a modicum of control.
On Arch you can easily uninstall Linux.
The fun part is that there are even legit reasons to do so, the by far most likely one being that you want to use a different package that provides you with a kernel, such as linux-lts or linux-hardened. Definitely know what you are doing in that case though!
Linux in general and Arch in particular are kinda laissez-faire in that they’ll allow you to shoot yourself in the foot. Some distros may put barriers in your way, others practically hand you the gun, but at the end of the day, the gun is freely available and it’s your own foot that you’re shooting.
Microsoft also wants to use 50 gigabytes of your hard drive space (for the Recall snapshots) and make you buy AI co-processors or their software won’t work. They want to use your property to create their own Skynet.
Soeaking of coprocessors…if it’s not in the cpu die, I wonder if we can just desolder the stupid AI chip.
Because they make it easy and do a few cool things.
“Do you want a mic in your home that can record everything you say and do and send that data off to wherever the company chooses?”
“No of course not.”
“What about of it will also turn your lights on and off and play despacito on demand?”
“You son of a bitch, sign me up”.
This is also the reason why typing on the TV is so bad and the remote has a huge microphone button on it.
Do you tolerate the TPM/fTPM in your computer? Can you deactivate it? Can you query it? Can you tell it to do something?
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Yes, you can remove and interact with your TPM chip. I don’t know why you’re coming in so hot on this person, your last name Ballmer or something?
I did it! I did it over the long weekend. Been using Windows since 3.1 (albeit only switched fully from MSDOS when Windows 2000 came out).
I did a test run on my laptop during time away from home/desktop over the summer, using Linux Mint, to see if I can do work and school on an unfamiliar system exclusively. On Mint I never had to open the terminal and everything worked right out of the box. Cinnamon is very similar to Win10 too. Heck, I can’t even remember the installation procedure, it was so hands off and easy.
After two failed attempts of Arch on the same laptop, I’ve managed to install it with help of archinstaller on my main desktop. No idea what I’m doing, but I got it up and running to a state where I can do both work and school.
FUCK Windows and the constant nag it does everywhere. Good riddance.
Well done. Mint is the gateway drug, perfect for users like you. Progress and attempts with arch are noble though! Glad it didn’t scare you off.
It did! I just checked and I put it (arch) on the back burner for four months.
But yes, Mint and similar easy to install distros are the way to go for someone new for sure. Probably don’t even need to move on from it ever, as long as it works.
Good work getting through arch installer, it can be tricky too. I’ve been on arch for like 10 years and still don’t think anything else is better.
Not everything is as snappy as I’d like it to be yet. Maybe KDE Plasma is not the best for my 12 year old system. Been thinking I should have gone with the zen kernel.
But I’m having tons of fun while discovering it nonetheless.
Plasma needs a decent graphics card so that’s probably why. You can disable a lot of the effects in the control panel though but it may not help.
I guess the fastest desktop is xfce otherwise, it’s so fast that apps launches instantaneously. Reminds me of how fast computers can actually be without eye candy.
You can easily install and try it on arch to see if you like it. Good instructions in arch wiki as usual.
Lol I misread this as you’d been relying on windows 3.1 and never upgraded but that 11 including recall made you switch to Linux. I need to be more thorough in my reading .
That’d be hard core. Alas, I don’t have balls of steel and/or a mushy brain like that.
I bet there’s still someone out there that makes it work somehow.
Lol i don’t doubt it. Some people get fixated and can’t be swayed.
I applaud your bravery with Arch. Have some fun with it and don’t worry if you break stuff. Keep your files backed up and you’re golden! Even if you switch to a different distro later on, a lot of what you learn will translate 1:1.
I just really aimed for it due to the meme.
Mint is great.
I use Linux Mint cinnamon on a daily basis, typically with one or two command line terminals open at all times (one normal and one in a docker container), and with some kind of code always open too. I use 4 monitors as well, which the same machine can’t handle when I boot into windows.
No apologies and no regrets. Being user friendly doesn’t mean it’s limited. It uses Ubuntu and Debian stuff after all, just with the controversial Ubuntu stuff removed.
I really love it on my laptop.
The only thing that scared me is its reliance on Ubuntu. I wonder if it can go beyond that some day somehow. Plus I wanted to try something different. I have no idea what I’m talking about btw.
Good choice on Mint.
I have been using Linux exclusively (personal) since 2008, distro hopped for a few years then settled on Ubuntu, until they shot themselves in the foot with 22.04 and the snap debacle; moved to Mint (after trying Pop, MX and a few others).
I have to say a big well done to the Mint devs, it is better than Ubuntu ever was; part of this is newer drivers etc…but it is very polished and it gets out of my way and lets me do my work.
Been working with the various flavors of Windows in a work capacity over the same stretch, in my opinion windows peaked with XP, 7 was ok, and 10 is also ok. But it really has been down hill since XP was retired.
Yeah, XP was pretty good.
After a lot of back and forth between MSDOS/Win98SE (I used to play a lot of QuakeWorld which did not need much), I finally got an AMD Duron 800 around 2000, and someone recommend me Win2k. It was a really stable system, way ahead of its time in terms of user management and services compared to Win98SE and early XP. I think I’ve stayed on it well past it’s final release. I got sucked into WoW in 2008, so definitely had to move on by then.
To be fair, you never forget your first. Amiga workbench for the A500 was some of the best computing…
Yeah, XP was pretty good.
I was a young sysadmin during this era, I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment. It got tolerable by the time of the last service pack, but it was a security nightmare otherwise and didn’t offer much over Win2k.
That said, I’m not a Windows fan in general, but I’d class the following as the “good” ones:
- NT 3.5 (user-mode GDI FTW!)
- Phone 7.0 (this was probably what I’d call the Practically Perfect version of Windows. WP7 is just so good)
- NT 3.1 gets an honourable mention
- 8 (after WP7, this is the first version of Windows that was pretty much stable on day one. Say what you will about the UI, the core was the best Microsoft has ever one; ditto fir Server 2012)
- 10 (8 but with refinement; I’m cautious putting it here because you can see the genesis of the decisions that gave us 11)
- Vista (a lot of what people like about 7 really came from Vista, like the WDDM driver model and the improved security infrastructure; Vista, like NT, came out before hardware was commonly available that could run it)
Anchoring the bottom
- 98 & ME (IE integrated everywhere and the security nightmare it begat deserves a special place in hell)
- 1.0 (you had to be there, but this thing made Atari TOS look sophisticated)
- 95 pre-OSR2 (VxDs, DLLs and a login screen you could bypass with an escape key!)
- NT4 (it wasn’t bad, per se, but I still resent how unstable it was versus 3.5)
- CE and pre-5.0 Mobile (hey, guess what, replacing your battery wipes your device because we didn’t implement persistent storage!)
- 11 (10 without most of the redeeming features, plus an Android launcher for a Start menu. Now with extra spyware!)
A lot of people really like 7 and 2000, but I tend to think of those as polish releases of Vista and NT4. They’re Microsoft eventually fixing their mistakes, after having everyone drag on them for years.
Did mine a few weeks ago. The only part I’m stuck on is OneDrive, which I unfortunately need. I got access to my personal files but not the shared files. The other part is I still need to download all of my mods…which I am not looking forward to 😆 but let me just say it is so nice to have a computer that actually works! It’s older so it was getting impossibly slow.
Between Linux and the new IRS software I am feeling spoiled.
Out of curiosity, what step in the arch install did you have issues with on your first two attempts?
I always wonder where the line is for the majority of people, maybe there isn’t one and they know it. You’ve got to hand it to Microsoft nearly 30 years and they still have the majority.
I agree, I don’t think they have any limit. Look at how invasive platforms like Facebook are, and yet they’re still massively popular. Mobile operating systems are several times worse than Windows is for privacy and data harvesting, and people clearly don’t care at all. They’ll even happily consent to ever more levels of it - there’s no evidence to suggest that they’ll ever stop.
One of the biggest “mistakes” Microsoft made was not realizing how lucrative data collection could be. Back in the quaint old days of early PC computing, spyware was actually considered a bad thing. When Google came along, that philosophy was flipped on its head. Over the past 15 years, Microsoft has seeing what these spyware vendors are doing and salivating because they know that they are still the kings of computing - they still have total control the PC market and there’s a good chance that it’s not really going anywhere because most people hate change - even though Linux is starting to make inroads in quite a few places.
It would not be surprising if, in a few years, a Windows OS looks like a Google search page, or a cable television channel.
This is the same false analogy people make as to why Americans drive giant trucks to shift blame… it’s not the manufacturers who are pushing these cars to circumvent taxes, it is the users for demanding it.
Very few people actually like these invasive shit Microsoft pulls, but the vast majority either do not know about them, understand them or feel they have another choice. For example, I hate MS, I understand what dog shit this Recall feature is, yet my job will provide a Windows machine with it and I have no choice but to use it.
I am a nerd so at home I do have everything running on Linux. But for the majority of people that would be a unknown option or just an unobtainable one
We drive giant trucks because the small ones are cheap pieces of shit, with inferior designs, inferior engines, and inferior driveline components, that aren’t rated to tow or haul anything.
I don’t give a shit about what work gives me saying all I’m doing is work on that thing. Now what I’m really afraid of is Microsoft pulling data from the sensors on the device when I’m working from home with it. I need too think of a way to deal with it (I do not have a separate room for work)
It’s because Apple products are heinously expensive, and Linux is far more hassle than most people are willing to go to.
There’s also Chrome OS, I have no idea if it’s any good though.
From my limited experience using it on a shitty Chromebook for school (granted also pretty locked down) and it’s not great. Pretty much only useful for doing web things and the Google ecosystem. I also have no idea whether it’s even possible to get it on anything else.
From a UI perspective I didn’t really like it l, especially as it and other chrome apps got more and more sleek and curvy. I did grow up using a Linux mint laptop though, only getting a dual booted Linux/Windows PC in highschool for some games that needed it as well as running SOLIDWORKS at home. (thanks to my dad for all that lol)
There is no such thing as a line, it seems to be a long gradient and its about how fast you move on the gradient. If you ever so slightly introduce more and more crap slowly enough, people don’t care as they forget how good they had it much earlier.
Great way of putting it
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Boiling the frog
If you buy a PC it has Windows on it. The majority of people are not cocking about formatting a USB stick and fiddling with the BIOS to put Linux on it. They aren’t thinking about operating systems at all, and if you need specific software for work, chances are it isn’t going to run on anything other than Windows. If you don’t need it for work, you’ve probably just got a tablet by now and store all your photos on Facebook.
If you buy a PC it has Windows on it. The majority of people are not cocking about formatting a USB stick and fiddling with the BIOS to put Linux on it.
And increasingly the majority of people don’t even bother to keep a PC anymore and just use their phone
Exactly. We used to have a massive chain of shops called PC World, and that eventually became Currys/PC World, and is now just Currys.
The age of computers came and went, and people still need washing machines and TVs. They still sell laptops I think, but if you want anything from their range of “gaming” PCs, they have to order it in, usually from one of the many stores online that will build them for you.
Windows already lost. It lost to Android.
That comic really reminds me of trying to degoogle and FOSSify my computer as a complete novice. Multiple, extremely frustrating times, I’ve wanted to install something but I genuinely have not been able to understand the installation instructions. I also don’t know enough to know what the right search terms are to find out what I’m meant to do.
I’m still trying but it’s fucking demoralising.
Doesn’t it say more about the users than Microsoft? Seems to me that people who don’t care about computers will accept anything coming from big tech…
They don’t relly know better. Windows is familiar, Linux sounds too complicated and techy. Hell, I was thinking the same and I’m reasonably tech savvy. It’s infinitely more friendly than I’d ever expect.
People are afraid of change and unknown. Though ironically Linux might actually be closer to the original Windows experience that Win11 is (speaking from my limited experience with Mint)
Yeah, I guess it means they know people don’t care, and they can do what they want. What are you going to do, use the scary CLI OS that’s for nerds. Or spend loads of money on a walled garden, no just stay in the cosy middle.
All my windows friends and family just don’t care, computers are a utility, and they won’t learn something as easy as Mint or Bazzite. To them, they still see Linux as it was in the 2000s.
There are whole businesses dedicated to MS, like everything they do is MS. You hire an IT firm, they’ll plonk a load of Dells in your offices and spin up Exchange 2019 where everything bespoke is programmed in C#, despite their being better products because it’s all they know. They spent all that money on MS partnerships.
Microsoft have created a stable ecosystem we didn’t learn in the late 90s or the mid 2000s and we will carry on because at this point it’s effort. Unless you’re Germany…
Right in front of me is a guy editing a >10 page LaTeX file in Overleaf on a 13 inch laptop. The sidebar takes like 1/3rd of the screen. The editor in around 3 inches in width, and he needs to zoom into the PDF preview to read it.
The point in, some people simply don’t care about anything.
This is the thing Lemmy nerds don’t understand:
For most people, using a PC is a chore.
To most people, using a PC is like mopping a floor, or cleaning a car. It’s a boring - even unpleasant - task that you need to do every once in a while. They’d rather be on their phone or their iPad.
When you already view using your PC as a chore, and some Linux user says to you “hey, if you spend a day backing up all your files, creating an install USB, installing Linux, reinstalling your programs, logging back in to everything, moving your data back across, and relearning how to use a PC, it’ll be worth it in the long run!”, you will just ignore their advice. It’s easier just to say “nah, I only occasionally need my PC when I want to update my CV or write a long email anyway.”
They put up with an hour or two of MS’s bullshit every few months. They don’t like it, but they also don’t care enough about putting effort in so that in future, the chore of using a PC only feels half as bad. At the end of the day, either way, it’s still a chore.
In the same way that they also don’t care enough about saving 10 mins every time they clean their car to do the initial work of claybar-ing, polishing, then waxing it.
You are correct, but on the other hand it doesn’t hurt to make the average person aware of alternatives.
Can be especially effective when the person buys a new PC and needs to do all the stuff you mention anyway. Yes, it is still a new OS, but honestly, it’s not that different - especially if the person remembers older Windows versions, it might just feel like going to familiar places (I know this is something my wife would really apreciate as she hates the constant changes of how things look). Obviously depends on distro, only have experience with Mint.
I’m saying this from a position of a resonably tech savvy, but not your average tech nerd (at least knowledge wise lol). Sure there are differences under hood but I don’t think the average user would really notice them that much.
Yes, small things could quickly put ordinary people off Linux with the current state of software. I’m involved in running an organization that needs to submit reports regularly to the government using their online forms. Unfortunately the forms are PDFs that only seem to work in recent versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Any other software results in a more or less broken form. I haven’t yet found anything in Linux (even on Wine) that handles these forms properly. So sometimes I have to use Windows.
For me there are still enough benefits to using Linux that I continue with it as my main OS, but for most people they’d quickly get annoyed by obstacles like this. Of course the government shouldn’t be using one company’s proprietary format that only runs on commercial OSes for their forms, but that’s the way it is for now.
Well, the PDF format was created by Adobe and even though they somehow got it to technically be considered an open document format. They are to my knowledge still the only entity with a complete implementation in existence. Just some food for thought.
The gov and higher education should be forced to use open source software. I would absolutely support that.
Hmm, I wonder if there could be an exploit where Recall is covertly turned on, so it can be used to exfiltrate data. Not a good idea to basically have a surveillance rootkit sitting passively on your system, with no ability to remove it, just waiting to get abused by attackers. But using this proprietary garbage OS nowadays isn’t a good idea in general and there is a much better alternative.
There’s always the Microsoft telemetry blocklist in pihole. If you can’t stop the computer collecting the data, you can stop MS getting hold of it.
Windows does have its own command-line package manager. I don’t know if it can remove Recall, but last I checked it could remove Cortana. It would just get reinstalled soon after, but that could be prevented with some file-naming trickery. If you give a file the same name as the folder used to have and make it read-only, it couldn’t remake the folder and wouldn’t reinstall.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you can still do that now.
Which one do you mean? Winget which is their newest attempt at creating a package manager that isn’t an absolute piece of garbage, or their crappy CLI for managing MSIX/APPX modules? Because I remember using the latter to try and remove Cortana back when I first tried Windows 10. Fast forward, I removed all the garbage I didn’t need, applied a Windows update, restarted my PC and it was all reinstalled. I wiped that SSD the same day and went back to Linux. This was the last time I used Windows on any of my personal devices.
I’d say you didn’t actually remove the garbage. “Settings, apps, uninstall” doesn’t really get rid of it, the deployment package is still hanging around.
You need to use powershell to de-deploy those packages.
It’s a bit like the difference between “apt remove” and “apt purge”
I was talking about Appx. I haven’t used Windows in a while, but that was how I got rid of Cortana. The key part was the read-only file named after the folder that couldn’t be replaced.
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I actually want this feature, but I want to own the data. There are some OSS projects writing basically identical things but they aren’t too popular (https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/rem seems to be the most popular I could find, but I wasn’t able to get the cross-platform version running on my machine).
I also wrote the dumbest possible clone of this feature in bash, the basic data gathering steps are actually pretty easy to do. I’d build this into a real program but I’ve just been too busy lately with other projects: https://jackson.dev/post/cloning-windows-recall-in-30-lines-of-bash/
Yeah the idea is nice but not with Microsoft seeing the data.
Install Linux, it’s easier, leaner, faster than windows shit, it’s also free, does actual security, and won’t ever spy on you.
Send in the down votes
Does Lemmy not like Linux all of a sudden…?
There are more users now, some are tired of the Linux recommendations in every thread.
They are wrong of course and should just switch. :)
It’s not that, it’s mainly because they’re tired of being browbeaten and having their freewill raped by someone who is basically being just yet another marketer. A marketer that is pushing a free product. To them, it’s just one more obnoxious annoying ad that they have to deal with and block.
We fucking get it, Linux is there, they know. They aren’t switching in the numbers that you’re to meet, mr.free marketer. They just want you to shut the fuck up and leave them alone.
And that automatically puts you in the wrong everytime. So take your pompous attitude and choke on it.
Bit weird to be so angry about this. The commenter is not ‘basically just another marketer’ because they have nothing (financial or otherwise) to gain from others using linux. They genuinely believe it is a better product and it is in your interests to use it.
Direct your anger at Microsoft if you feel as though you are being forced to do anything, they the ones choosing to enshitify Windows, and removing it as a viable option.
When you’re going around on EVERY. SINGLE. MICROSOFT. THREAD. to say “GO ON LINUX! IT MAKES YOU HARD IN YOUR PANTS!” YOU are by and large, being a marketer. Just because you aren’t getting paid for it or aren’t directly affiliated, doesn’t remove that ability that you’re going around advertising for this product.
Bit weird to be so defensive on this and re-purpose what marketing is when you just outlined what marketing is like.
No I won’t direct my anger at Microsoft, don’t you tell me shit. I’m directing my anger at you and the OP because of shit like this with the whole Linux parade that always happens whenever anything is reported about Microsoft.
I would’ve thought that Linux usage going over 1% for once in a long time, would’ve been enough to shut you guys the fuck up. Guess not. Gotta inflate numbers. Gotta promote GROWTH!
So sick of you Linux clowning fanboys parading your free advertising. Bit weird of you to justify that, ain’t it? Bit weird.
Stop raping people’s free choice already, just stop. You don’t see Windows users telling Linux users to go use Windows, do you? No, you don’t.
Loser
Nobody is attacking your free choice, they’re literally trying to give you another option. That’s what free choice is all about.
If you are making an informed devision to remain with windows as it gets worse and worse, then that is up to you, but don’t come at people for trying to offer you an alternative just because you’ve made that decision.
It’s not that, it’s mainly because they’re tired of being browbeaten and having their freewill raped
Ok. Stick with the company that’s forcing recall on you.
Okay, I’ll stick to an OS that currently don’t have that feature and still got a few years left of extensive support. Of which I’ll still be on said OS even if support truly ends, by which comes time to consider upgrading, Microsoft will already be on the next Windows version.
See how your blatant and baseless assumption falls apart? Idiot.
If only driver support was the same as in Windows, or if windows drivers other than networking ones can be used in Linux.
Well, not without also uninstalling Windows…
[ Insert “I see this as an absolute win!” meme here ]
Except I’m a gamedev, and I’ll have to keep around at least one Windows PC. Might be a Win10 one with extended support updates.
Oof. Yeah, I don’t use my computer for work, so I’d never even thought of that. That’s annoying.
They see a pile of cash and can’t resist. The only way it’ll truly stop is if users boycott everytime they try to bring it back, which will be neverending.
Regedit the shit off your systems
Fedora KDE or Linux Mint is the way
cinnamon, gnome, xfce? Many flavors of Mint
