Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:46 Sponsor: TuxCare Radar
02:23 Windows 11 is failing right now
05:20 What’s the job of an OS?
06:51 Updates break systems. Often.
10:53 You have to adapt to it
15:14 It’s highly intrusive
17:44 Debloating tools don’t make it good
20:19 Windows fails at being an OS
21:33 Alternatives are better, but not perfect
27:23 Windows is a sales platform, not an OS
I recently dumped W11 off my wife’s ROG Ally handheld and replaced it with SteamOS. It’s a day and night difference in performance. ASUS is absolutely fucking themselves by shipping it with this vibe-coded trash OS. W11 is total dog shit. The only good thing it does is drive a lot of people into the arms of Linux.
It’s a nice circle jerk, but it has way more market share than Linux (at least on desktop, which y’know it’s a desktop OS), so by that measure it is a “success”.
You have to really stretch to some abstract definition of success to call it a failure.
Version 11 didn’t make that market share happen. It inherited that from win XP
Kind of a dubious claim, in the context of Windows not having nearly as much market dominance as they used to, and Linux adoption being far higher than it used to. Linux as a platform now has enough of a userbase that even companies like Epic are beginning to take it seriously.
Meanwhile reviews of Windows these days are so nearly universally poor, they are basically coasting on nothing but the inertia of their own previous success - which is eroding.
It’s a market success and a performance failure. Not much of a stretch of any definition.
Have you watched the video before trying to argue against the title?
Capitalist brain.
WINDOWS 11 IS GREAT IF YOU DONT VALUE YOUR TIME
Even with that caveat I wouldn’t agree.
But there’s something to it.
For me, a decade of Linux user, having been forced to work with a bunch of Windows laptops recently, even the difference between 10 and 11 was palpable. Not only in resource usage but also in just getting around the system, running updates, trying to disable the stock ticker (?WTF?) etc.
trying to disable the stock ticker (?WTF?)
Geeze I should have invested in “?WTF?🔺” years ago. Look how ?WTF?🔺 is everywhere now! Especially the tech industry. 😭
Lately I often reminesce on the time SSD has become available. My previous laptop would take 5 minutes to fully open the system, and suddenly BAM! SSD and it was 30 seconds. I remember being blown away. How the fuck did we end up back here. How is it 5+ minutes to start a stupid OS again.
I remember that too! My crappy old computer. I bought the cheapest SSD they had and it was so much faster.
And I’ve been thinking about the latter too.
BTW I truly hope your Windows takes 5min for a cold boot, and not your Linux, because that would mean there’s something wrong with it or the hardware.
My work laptop is only allowed windows 11 [*]. At least I work for it on company time.
Windows is great! Unless you value privacy…or RAM… or Bandwidth efficiency…or easy networking… or owning your system
Why would people running Linux even care about the success/failure of Windows 11?
Because the worse windows 11 gets and the more people move off of it, the more corporations will be forced to support it with their products. Meaning we won’t have to rely on hacky bullshit to get them to work.
I have to use it for work, and the difference between how my work laptop and my personal laptop (Debian 43) handles basic tasks is stark.
The stuff like “will my headphones work?” has been solved for years at this point. I’m talking even more basic, like rendering the UI and loading menus.
“will my headphones work?”
It was Linux the one you had to check if basic peripherals would work.
Now it is windows the one that gives issues with headphones, the one in charge of the equipment is fed up with all of the complaints related to windows and headphones (the ones provided by the enployer and the personal ones).
Last Friday windows decided to stop working with the laptop’s webcam, and it was stuck as in use despite even turning off the camera in setttings.
The webcam being stuck on sounds like a Microsoft “feature” that would accompany “We’ve made updates to our EULA” that you’d be forced to accept to start Windows next time. 😬 Lol
You still will run into issues with certain Bluetooth headphones on Linux because they either need proprietary codecs that just aren’t available or fall back to really shitty ones. Not Linux’ fault, but users will only see (or hear) that it doesn’t work properly.
Examples you have noted, sir; for awareness’ sake.
I’d have to ask, they weren’t mine. But part of the problem was that it’s either high latency and no mic or very low quality both ways, neither very usable for video conferencing. Was fine on Windows. I’m sure their Thinkpad’s shitty Mediatek Bluetooth module didn’t help either.
My Jabra ones work but they’re kind of janky.
What is the future like? knowing the slow cadence of debian you must be from the very far future.
you know what’s funny, is that my noise cancelling headphones started to have serious problems when I ‘upgraded’ to windows 11. it would pick up the noise cancelling mics and decide they were the primary, not my standalone dedicated microphone.
in the process, it would also downgrade the sound quality for some fucking reason. no matter how many ways I disabled them, it would either re-enable them or I’d find a new way to try.
with Linux? just works.
100%. I’m not quite as ardently anti-Windows as most on this community from a UI/UX standpoint, but both Bluetooth and audio device switching are genuinely terrible experiences in Windows. I find myself pairing audio devices from scratch all the time on my work laptop, and it’s painful every time.
Ehh their UI sucks moving copy and paste from the right click menu to the top of the right click menu as icons sucks.
I use a focusrite scarlet 2i2 2nd gen audio interface for my microphone. The driver hasn’t been updated for a few years now but even when it was recent, I had issues with my mic quality randomly breaking, making me sound like a robot to my friends. I have had zero issues since switching to linux without even installing any special software for it.
The only thing I kind of miss is that windows allowed me to mix down both mic inputs to a single mono channel whereas on linux both inputs are presented as separate mono channels. I suppose I could fix it with some 3rd party tools but I did not miss it too much so far.
Glad I don’t use Win11
It’s a little less terrible if you can use the LTSC IoT version.
Yep, been over a year now on Linux, I’ll never go back.
About a year and a half ago I got a laptop to prepare for moving countries. Figured “I’ll probably distro hop a bit see what I like so let’s start pretty plain with Arch”. I’ve uh never distro hopped, Arch my beloved, great daily driver does exactly what I tell it to
My issue with Arch is all the other stuff it installs when installing packages. It is annoying.
the dependencies? all distros have those, unless everything is statically compiled (bad idea) or you could potentially have less of them if you run gentoo and unset a lot of USE flags.
It really is.
I’ve been a Unix maximalist since I can remember, but I’ve never convinced my peers to follow.
Since windows 11 has dropped, every single one of them now has a Linux machine for one purpose or another. Some are now considering a complete purge of MS products, as I have.
It’s happening.
Friend!
It’s been a long road, getting from there to here.
It’s glorious, isn’t it?
Only thing I’m having a little trouble getting away from is are some office products and email hosting.
Once Gmail has the equivalent of shared inboxes, I’ll switch to them for my business hosting.
In case people here are not aware, I can create free email address with my domain name for receiving only.
This is great because I don’t really need to send mail for each account I receive mail at, but with Gmail you have to pay for each one as far as I know.
Yes this is tough.
We use Google Workspace. I use Proton at home.
In case people here are not aware, I can create free email address with my domain name for receiving only.
You should be able in gmail, under the Accounts tab in Settings, to add accounts to “Send mail as”. Not sure how much of your problem that solves, though, if any.
That works to some extent, although certain receivers like Yahoo will bounce messages because it breaks sender authentication protocols. I had to switch from Gmail to Proton (paid, the free version doesn’t allow it) to fix that.
If you’re sending as a domain with a dkim record allowing gmail to send from it, that shouldn’t be an issue as far as I’m aware.
You can set up a catch-all for your domain, didn’t cost extra last time I checked. Granted, it’s been 15 years or so…
They’re isn’t one positive thing to say about it at all. Not even one.
It’s not Millennium Edition?
Of course there is. It’s compatible with almost any software and hardware (if you ignore their arbitrary W11 “requirements” which you can in most cases) that you can get your hands on. Microsoft and Windows deserve most of the flack they’re getting, but we should be honest.
Take Linux as a comparison. Compatibility is pretty good nowadays and is only getting better, especially with all the work going into Proton from both Valve and the community. But certain things are simply not supported which can make it either difficult or straight up impossible to get to work. Not that Linux is to blame for that, of course, but it is reality.
Almost any software or hardware? Better to phrase it as almost all desktop software
Well yes, but this whole thread is about Windows 11 which is a desktop OS, so I thought that went without saying.
Sure there is: Sometimes it doesn’t boot. And nobody can deny that it’s been great for driving linux adoption!
There’s one thing Windows does that I miss. The big preview pane in file explorer.
Dolphin seems to have that feature. Menu (the three lines button in the top right) > Show Panels > Information
Yep don’t believe me see what kids on windows are doing(fixing what should have been already fixed years back)
windows in general has always been a failure. I love how now I can solve most problems
I find it pretty good, very stable, no viruses (I think)
