Those of you who still use windows for one reason or more, where do you draw the line about the shitty things microsoft is doing? By drawing the line I mean using some other operating system no matter how bothersome it might be.
Not judging or anything, i’m just curious where the general mindset is about it.
I drew the line at Windows 10. It was bad enough. 11 was a bridge too far. I basically quit 4 months ago and wiped my last Windows machine today. I just made a post about it!
For anyone on the fence, do it!
I stopped using Windows on my own machines many years ago. It was probably about the time when the games I was playing ran well enough, so dual booting was just taking up space I could use.
I was building myself a new computer from scratch and I had a friend whose laptop I would borrow on occasion that had win 11 on it.
Knowing how bad win11 was and knowing I’d have to pay yet another $100+ to be graced with the garbage on my system, I decided to partition an old laptop and play around on mint for a minute. The rest, they say, is history.
Unfortunately with the way you asked, and especially with asking on Lemmy, you’ll get a lot of tech saavy people, and FOSS enthusiasts. You’ll also get a handful of people here who can’t help but talk down to anyone who dares to say that Windows isn’t just the fucking worst.
I’m primarily Windows, with an Ubuntu VM for working with obscure FOSS utilities (like I had to use someone’s college project to recover data off a USB HDD where the enclosure broke, and it turned out the manufacturer used whole disk encryption so you couldn’t just shuck it and go, but it was thankfully trivial with the key stored in a specific sector) and to work with github projects that only provide build instructions for Linux.
I run a personally customized and debloated install of Windows 10 Pro on my desktop, and Windows 10 Ameliorated (someone else’s debloat setup I cribbed a decent amount from) on a laptop that is mostly used as a remote endpoint for the desktop through sunlight/moonlight (whatever the open source version of nVidia streaming is). The debloating took maybe 4 hours (6 if you include the time to figure out how to stream updates and drivers into the install media) and I’ve had no issues with any of the shit people complain about. I’m in control of my own updates (although you can’t delay them indefinitely, you can push them back multiple weeks and prevent auto-restarts), no onedrive, stripped out telemetry shit and blocked through host file and DNS in case any was missed or added later. No updates have reset any settings I’ve set, despite the common insistence that everyone says they do.
But I also have almost a decade in supporting Windows, from intro IT help desk to many years as a sysadmin and IT infrastructure “engineer”. I know what levers Microsoft has built for businesses to use to kill the bullshit, anf I cry at just how ridiculously bad a shit ton of Windows advice online is.
As far as Linux goes, I’m no stranger to it, and have been poking around with it since Knoppix was one of the only options (if not the only) for live-boot. I’m the go to guy on my team for the few Linux based appliances we run that don’t belong to the network team. I want it to be a competitive alternative for corporatized software.
But I bounced off it in the mid-late 00’s as I got tired of how much tinkering it took. By the time I was interested in checking it out again, I was working in IT, and nothing drains you of energy to tinker with computers at home like doing it eight hours a day for work. I wanted my stuff at home to just work, to the point that I even was mostly gaming on console.
I’m out of my burnout now, built a new desktop when I got my sysadmin/infra position, and built up a homelab of VMs to try (and fail to) speedrun studying for the MCSE before MS stopped offering it, since I work in a primarily Windows environment.
Whenever I finally get some free time, I plan to sit down and document customizing Win11 to not suck for the sake of all the people online that insist it simply isn’t possible at all… and to set aside a dedicated drive to try out some more modern Linux distros again.
But I’ll be honest, most Linux troubleshooting stuff still seems to be pretty finicky and still a tradeoff compared to the amount of stuff that “just works” on Windows (nVidia GPUs, HDR, VRR for a few examples). Definitely far better than it used to be, but still not to the point where the OS just gets out of your way. Windows still seems to be able to get to that point more easily.
I hope to proven wrong in my opinions about the current state of things.
I probably wouldn’t have a giant picture window in front of the toilet.
I use windows because the fire code mandates it, and cause having sunlight in rooms is nice. Also I can see the weather and when the mail arrives.
My dog’s use Windows to spot their dreaded enemy, the squirrel.
We will never be able to repay them for this vigilance
Its still on my wife’s and step child’s PCs, but not on mine. They don’t seem bothered by it or don’t use them enough to be inconvenienced, and I’ll not force my will on their user experiences. If they mention anything about it I’ll gladly help them get into bazzite as I have. So far we’ve all still been able to play the games we want to together. Oh and my wife has a work laptop that has to be windows but that can’t be helped.
I was only on Windows for gaming. When Kushner / Saudi royalty bought EA, I dipped because of Kashoggi. I would like to still play bf6 and fortnite but not enough to stay on Windows.
The AI nonsense would need to personally disrupt my user experience on a daily basis.
I’ve already made up my mind about switching due to the AI nonsense that has already happened, but I’ve been putting off actually doing anything about it.
I drew the line when my Windows box told me I couldn’t do something even with admin. Kid, you work for ME, not the other way around.
Always preferred Linux over Windows, but I had issues with games on it. I just decided that I wouldn’t play any games that didn’t work. That was a couple of years ago now, and things have only improved since.
My fiance, who is not a technical person, even decided she wanted her new PC to run Linux unprompted, which is a hell of a win for Linux and for me in not having to support a Windows box in the house.
Why anyone is OK with Microsoft’s key logging of everything including passwords is beyond me.
Thank you for mentioning that, wasn’t aware it was doing that. Disabled it now.
Any of these things comes to mind:
- Not respecting my configuration.
- Updates taking hours and then having to boot safe mode to repair after said update.
- Having to constantly fight spyware.
- The feeling that my computer is not my own.
- Stupid design decisions.
- Feeling like an unpaid tester for an anti-consumer company.
If it does not work on linux, I don’t buy it. I’m sick of Microsoft. They feel like abusers.
But all of these things are already happening. Why are you still a Windows user if these are your lines in the sand? (Did you mis-read the assignment?)
The line is between my home and the office. Linux at home for nearly twenty years and windows at work because so few know better.
I only use Windows at work because that is what they have me on my work laptop and I haven’t replaced it. I just use Linux in a VM instead. That way I don’t need to explain a thing to internal IT, but just work within the VM.
My work is maintaining a distributed windows network. Domain controllers VM’s and over a hundred workstations in several locations.
When they forced me to go to Windows 11, even though my computer, technically could’ve ran windows 11, it was just missing a certain component on the motherboard so wouldn’t install. I told them to piss off, and I switched over to Linux. (Mint Linux)
I hate Windows more than anything or anyone in this world. Pretty sure my blood pressure is up a little just thinking about dealing with that OS.
Last time I used Windoze was to create a live usb to install Linux.
