I banished Windows from my life a long time ago. My quality of life improved shortly thereafter. I had reached rock bottom after spending a day trying to unbugger my mother in law’s computer. It felt like waking up after a long bender in a pile of my own sick. She caused the pain herself because Windows invited it without guardrails - yet somehow I was holding the bag. I’m Windows-clean now and no longer offer to try (or agree) to help. I know the personal risks. I support you if you’re still enraptured by the Windows range and despair. I get it. Getting clean isn’t easy. Gather the strength.
My flatmate is now a Linux user. But it took her so long to make the switch. What finally did it was when she sat down at a default windows 11 PC that I was fixing and we just opened the start menu saw a ton of ads and software applications that weren’t installed and you had to pay for. I showed her that almost every single application has ads for products built in (co pilot buttons, one drive etc) and I said this is what you’re going to pay money to upgrade to.
She installed mint and loves it. (I hate it because mint has so many small issues that are fixed in newer versions and it uses x11)
no fucking way
Best thing about Windows 11 is that my hardware doesn’t support it
It probably does. Microsoft just tried to pull a fast one and get everyone to upgrade because windows 11 was just that great!
…
My PC is 10 years old. It is not supported
So that’s why it is so freaking slow! 💩🤡💩🤡
Is right click menu one too? After boot, it always takes like 5 seconds for it to show up, recurring times it takes <1 second (not instant). I run last gen ryzen somethingsomethingXD and 4070 so my PC can definitely run a context menu.
On windows 11 or windows 10?
The <win10 context menu is old and poorly designed. Each app that declares itself on the right click menu gets to hold up the entire menu for like 3 seconds each. So if you have one poorly designed app that can appear on that list your right click menu will be super slow. Try to go through the right click menu and disable each app that appears one by one until you find the culprit.
Windows has this official tool, if you go to the explorer tab and find …/contextMenuHandlers section you can easily disable them one by one but i haven’t used it personally.
Win11 tried to fix this and moved to a different model but in doing so made the first level right click menu functionally useless.
Win11. I remember it being fine in Win10, though I didn’t have that many applications there, now I should have even less though.
Maybe I’ll look at what I have there now, in case I indeed have a misbehaving app.
i use win 11 and i can’t remember the last time i used the start button. there is no need.
Gosh, after all the hacks I do to Windows I often forget how terrible the experience is for all my users our there raw dogging it. 🪦
“I have deemed my own work to be ‘great’ and that’s the only professional feedback I take”
“great work” 🤭
Thats unironically based
Are you really asking?
It’s not that bad by default, it just gives it a disadvantage in terms of performance, but if you care about it you can still make it run smooth and be not-that-heavy. Microsoft just doesn’t.
It’s WHAT?
And yet it’s somehow less awful than the Windows 10 start menu. Is it still improvement if you put the bar under the floor yourself?
Windows is basically malware now. My wife is forced to use W11 for work and she fucking hates it with a passion (and that’s the pared down IT version).
I pulled out my old gaming laptop that had been unplugged for quite a while and found it somehow updated itself to W11. I immediately wiped the computer and installed Nobara as the main OS. No regrets, no issues, and no half-assed bullshit.
Windows on the ASUS ROG Ally is absolute dog shit. It would constantly reboot to install unwanted updates that offered zero value on a handheld (let alone anything).
Nothing I own will ever run Windows.
Windows isn’t popular. It’s forced onto tons of prebuilt computers and most people wouldn’t know what to use instead. Fuck Windows. Rant over.
I’ve used Windows my whole life at home. Last year I realized I kind of hate gaming at a desk since I’m at one all day for work, so I bought a used Steam Deck. Literally have not touched Windows since. I probably don’t need a home computer anymore and if I need one in the future, I’m confident it won’t be running Windows.
I have one too and love that thing! Even as a programmer, I find the only time I use a computer is during work time. Otherwise I’m mostly on my Steam Deck.
Rant on, bruddah! I am also in the “must use it for work” group, and I despise my work laptop with the fury of 1000 suns. In my personal work and prior to this new job, I was staying on Win 10 for Inventor, AutoCAD, FL Studio (and a bunch of VST synths I bought), and DaVinci Resolve Studio. My experience with my work laptop has spurred my nearly-complete jump to Linux.
FL Studio has been replaced by Bitwig, new learning curve and loss of the VSTs just being the cost I have to eat. I almost have DRS running in perfectly in Aurora Linux. And my two Win 10 machines will just go into an isolated network until I can figure out workarounds/replacements for the Autodesk garbage.
Reaper is another good DAW that runs natively.
Blender has great video editing capabilities. There’s also KDenLive and a few other native video editors.
CAD is harder unless you’re okay with switching to a parametric design flow with FreeCAD.
I collaborate with other people who are also on DRS. Before I had teammates on DRS, I tried using Blender, Openshot, Shotcut, KDenLive. Those NLEs are just not there yet.
I actually started my solid modeling/parametric journey on FreeCAD, and I prefer the parametric workflow. I switched to Inventor when FreeCAD kept crashing when the object tree was ~60 primitives even on my monstrous workstation. I would love to go back to FreeCAD, because fuck AutoDesk in its ear, so hopefully they get the stability + complexity under control.
Anecdotal, but I got a few VSTs working on Ardour with yabridge, if it helps.
What’s Nobara? I’ve never heard of that OS.
Adding on to the other comment, Nobara is maintained by Glorious Egroll, the same guy that also develops the popular Proton-GE compatibility tool which adds some extra fixes on top of Valve’s Proton.
(Proton is the compatibility tool Steam uses to make Windows games run on Linux, in case you’re unfamiliar)
Gamer-focused derivative of Fedora Linux.
Oh, I think I might hop over to that when I switch over the OS on my gaming PC.
You could also try bazzite, it is based on fedora atomic desktops
If someone can please make Autodesk stuff install and run under Wine, not saying Autodesk to deploy their stuff natively for Linux, I’d be gone with the blink of an eye. And I bet a lot of professionals too.
Maya and Motionbuilder run on Linux, but that happened before they were hoovered up by the monster. Autodesk just ignores that part of their portfolio. I know a few people who work/have worked on the Maya team and they’re talented, passionate devs, but management just doesn’t give a fuck about Media & Entertainment when Autocad and Revit are making so much money.
The best would be if the open source alternatives got better and more popular, like Blender did for 3D stuff.
Probably won’t happen under capitalism. It’s way too expensive (time consuming) to write good software/make good products.
gestures broadly at the entire FOSS ecosystem
What?
(sorry for the long answer)
Besides the vendor-lock-in and “enshitification” things (which are also a direct consequence of capitalism) just compare the Microsoft Office Suite against LibreOffice. It’s not even close.
Don’t get me wrong it works good enough for typical use-cases but the difference in depth, quality and polish is huge. Same with Photoshop vs Gimp, After Effects and other Adobe stuff.
Tons of software doesn’t even have proper Open Source equivalents because they are so nieche (compared to office software or VLC for example).
Unity (vs Godot), IDA Pro (vs Ghidra), EnCase, SolidWorks, etc.
Check out how Mozilla Firefox makes its money. They are over 80% funded by Google and make all kinds of shitty decision. Not because they are bad people but somebody has to pay development because good software doesn’t just happen because a hand full of junior devs have some free time.
Look at the shitty Ubuntu decisions, also done because somebody needs to pay for development.
Look at audacity, redis, FluentAssertions, OpenOffice, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, MySql, IdentityServer4 and many more OpenSource projects that went commercial or changed their license because it was unsustainable.
You can of course always fork, but the forked project than has the same issues. Development works as long there are skilled people motivated to practically donate their free time in exchange for nothing. That already greatly limits the people that even can work on open source and if their situation changes.
It’s not even OpenSource only. Look at YouTube creators especially science educators. A lot of them with great content and talent explaining various topics. But also trying to sell you stuff like squarespace, Brilliant and NordVPN because it would be unsustainable otherwise.
So yes great (by that I mean big polished good quality “unenshitified”) FOSS won’t happen under capitalism because writing software is time-consuming.
Why do you think people pirate commercial software like AutoCAD, Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, MS Office, SketchUp, SolidWorks, etc.? Because they are polished in a way no open source project could be, because hundreds of engineers worked for decades on those.
All that said, FOSS is great. I use and rely on a tom of OpenSource software, self-host a lot of services, regularly contribute to quite a few projects and also am the maintainer of some libraries other people use (even commercially) and I still stand by what I wrote before:
Open Source can’t be as polished and high quality as big commercial software because it doesn’t have the funds to do that. Five motivated people are not enough to write an After Effects competitor.
Adding to this, but I’m also not aware of many great Product Managers, UX designers or UX writers contributing to FOSS. Many devs have worked with shitty PM’s and like to dismiss their value, but a great one can make a massive difference in the quality of a product.
Same with the extensive UX design and UX testing that goes into making great products.
Windows is freemium now. It serves as a vehicle to sell other MS shit.
This is partly to do with the start menu trying to act like a search engine. Its frustrating when you are looking for a document or application and it searches the web.
Microsoft why can we not turn this off!
You can just disable web search through the settings app now.
I mean… KDE can do it just fine.
Some suggestions:
Really, its Linux that makes you spend all your time debugging issues and fixing things.
You can. I’ve had it off for years. It just needs a registry update, and persists across updates.
And people say Linux is not user-friendly
Half the changes in Linux are also editing random config files, so it’s about the same
At least they have cool names are easy to change and easy to find (except when they aren’t).
There’s a few ways to turn it off, but they require registry editing or using the Group Policy editor if you have a Pro license
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/11/26/how-to-turn-off-search-the-web-results-in-windows-11/
I have it turned off. But maybe that option is not available outside of EU? I don’t know.
I’m using keypirinha and haven’t opened the startmenu for years
It’s simple, really.
If the first results are a web search, you wouldn’t notice how terrible the local search indexing is.
I legitimately cannot believe how comically powerful medium level hardware has become yet the windows user experience is so much shittier than it was almost 20 years ago. I remember school machines struggling less to power up on 1gb ram and a one core machine that my gaming rig does sometimes. Windows is such a fucking waste of computing power.
ive had to learn never to use the ‘more info’ or ‘search’ options at all, as it defaults to a web search now instead of what im used to, a hdd search for my file or internal windows help documentation. fuggen
! something something you are the product smh my headI remember searching “control panel” and it brings up a brazilian cafe
React Native’s new architecture is not that bad.
You basically just got a single lightweight JavaScript thread that runs your rendering and updating logic, and then all the components are bound directly to underlying C++ native components.
I would still expect the start menu to be aiming for zero dependencies and as fast a start as humanly possible, but it’s not that crazy compared to something like Electron (which itself is not as inherently bad as most people make it out to be).
The real problem with slow web apps has less to do with the architecture of the apps, and more to do with them letting developers build apps really quickly and easily, meaning that you often have apps built by developers who don’t entirely know what they’re doing and introduce tons of inefficiencies like double rendering etc.
