I can ignore them just fine since I am no longer using Windows.
I haven't used Windows for more than 10 years and I'm happy too.
I think it's worth repeating that Ubuntu has been available since 2005 (20 years now) and from the start it filled the needs of most users at home (i.e. watching crap on YouTube and using LibreOffice). Most users I have seen around me only have basic requirements and should have switched decades ago.
TL;DR: if you complain about your computer nowadays and don't play games, install Ubuntu or Mint or anything else, I don't care anymore.
Even playing games on Linux is much better now thanks to Steam. Never a better time to change. I want my next phone to have Ubuntu Touch as well. Fuck the horrible Google/Apple ecosystem.
This might interest you https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder
damn that looks great. I can't wait to get a decent linux phone!
Since the rise of proton gaming is now absolutely viable on Linux as well. The exclusive use cases for Windows are disappearing fast.
Shoutout to the crew at Lutris for their gaming platform as well. I play Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online with it, and couldn't be more pleased with the performance.
There is only a subset of Windows games left that does not run on Linux. Mostly games with kernelbased Anti-Cheat and a few other outliers. I've been gaming exclusively on Linux for years now. Have a look at the ProtonDB website to see if your favourite games are running on Linux
The tech bros are turning everything to shit so you don’t notice any one thing is shit because it’s all shit now. Genius
I detest this company for many reasons, it's like they go out of their way to make dealing with them as painful as possible.
Here's just one example I discovered today. I have a Windows 10 VM I needed to upgrade to 11 but the "PC Health Check" app says no, the i5 processor isn't supported.
I can, however, create a new VM and install 11 on the exact same hardware, so that's what I did, along with a whole bunch of extra work to get the new VM set up the same as the old Windows 10 VM was.
Why? Because fuck you, that's why.
Assholes.
This is how i feel about 98% of Azure. Its just so needlessly complicated, with incomprehensible defaults, and out of date documentation, and APIs that just fail silently.
There is a way to upgrade directly. I got this from Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/1afu0uj/is_it_safe_to_install_windows_11_on_my_microsoft/
It works fine - you just won't get the more advanced security features available in more recent laptops.
.\sources\setupprep.exe /product server
This will not actually install the server version of windows but will bypass the CPU check so that you can install Win11 on an unsupported CPU. The actual version of Windows installed will depend on the version of Win10 you have: Pro, Home, or Enterprise, for example.
I’m starting to think Microsoft gives windows a new version number every time they want to make a bunch of big breaking changes, just so the bad reputation can die when they rebrand it as Windows 12 (or whatever stupid naming scheme their marketing team comes with next.)
I wouldn't be surprised if they just started calling it Copilot at some point. I could see them renaming their "agents" after big feature updates, much like we do with hurricanes which would be fitting given their history of breaking things with each KB.
I've been a Windows user my whole life. I support 5000+ Windows devices along with the whole Microsoft enterprise suite. It's been bad with them, but there have usually been patches at some point or at least community discovered workarounds. However, Microsoft's reckless abandon into AI legitimately worries me.
I'm finally making the switch to Linux for personal devices.
This generation of software companies really seem to have abandoned all previous goals for "Let's see how shit we can make this!"
"Sir, if we can finish our robot it could help with any household chores and even take over most of the care work for the elderly. Then in future patches we could make it waterboard the user unless they get the waterboardless premium subscription. Then we'll increase the cost and slowly reintroduce waterboarding even for subscribers."
You are now VP of product development at Microsoft. Congratulations.
P.S. Get a bullet proof vest and car.
I know that linux is the popular answer to this problem.
I use a Mac and it's a pretty good machine. I know it isn't for everyone, but it works well enough for me and has enough mainstream support. As well the hardware has gotten ' good enough'
MacOS is not hostile to me when I want to run and install programs. There is some opensource support on the platform and the a good amount of closed source programs.
I do miss the wide ranging PnP hardware support for things like SAS/LTO
Mac hardware is great. But they overcharge so much and are so anti right to repair that I could never give them my money
I have a 2012 MacBook Pro that runs exactly as it did when I bought it. It’s fast enough (i7), has retina resolution and can triple boot. I feel like I may have gotten my money’s worth over the 14 years it’s been running perfectly. The hardware is also still basically pristine.
Yeah the closed ecosystem is just cutting off your nose to game on your face
I think it's not hard to understand how MacOS is easily better than Windows. I don't think Apple is enshittifying quite as fast as Microsoft, if at all.
I have been very successful at ignoring Windows for quite some time.
Frankly I’ve never had any issues running Windows 11. It’s just the OS in the background for me. I think the biggest difference is I always run Enterprise versions (not Pro or Home) and most of that crap is either non-existent, disabled by default or easy to disable via GPO.
The big thing for people to realize is that Enterprise is the version most all businesses (especially large ones) run, and Microsoft isn’t going to crap on them as easily. And they know by extension, people will run what their business is, but they can get away with making Pro and Home crappier since it’s just individuals who would switch, not large swaths.
Pro and Home is where they test-market the worst of the garbage... some of it does make it into Enterprise - a surprising amount has gotten into Office 365 - but, yeah, not enough to make it completely dysfunctional.
Lol its amazing how Noone in the real world knows that microsoft makes OS's without all the enshitification shit in them that run decent, dont block features from being disabled, are all around non-infuriating piles of shit like the non-enterprise versions, charge an arm and a leg for it. Then microsoft (or at the same time didnt mean one before the other) releases the functionally identical OS versions but so facefucked full of enshitification shit they constantly break, these versions hold you down with an update pistol in your mouth that tells you inorder to live you will update every fucking shitstorm we tell you to, it rapes yo wife, rapes yo kids, ignores all bugs calling them features, all the while having a bomb strapped to their chest that says you dont accept everything we ruin of yours we blow your whole fucking system sky high. And those versions they call Home and Pro versions.
I'm not here to say get windows 11 but I did a fresh install several months ago when I got my 4090 off Facebook marketplace and I haven't had a problem yet. I just use it for gaming and don't really update my Nvidia drivers unless the hivemind says to. Idk that's my experience I guess.
Heretic!
Ha! It's 2026 now. Those problems can easily be ignored as they are all in the past.
I love the smell of pedantry in the morning
I have tried out a bunch of Linux ones last year and I will be converting over my main PC at some point this year due to all the things they have done or want to do with Windows 11. I agree it's very hard to ignore.
I like how taskbar buttons dynamically resize depending on window title. I like that the size of the buttons on the taskbar are all different, and I like not having a way to change this back to the boring obvious tried-and-true standard of having buttons that are all the same size.
I like that the rules appear to not make any fucking sense, leading to situations where you can have 3 entries for the same program with the same content open that are all different sizes.
I like it because it takes me out of whatever I'm doing and forces me to notice the user interface. I like getting distracted by little hints of movement at the bottom of the screen that make me stop and go "wait what the fuck did it just do".
I like that when I last searched for "windows 11 taskbar button resize disable", the only mention of the word "disable" on the first page of search results was this:
I like having to put "site:reddit.com" at the end of my search query before I can even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
And I like having to ultimately give up and live with it because at the end of the day, it's a feature and not a bug.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
