Windows 10 kept throwing up full screen ads for whatever bullshit they were trying to get me to sign up for while also telling me my computer wasn’t good enough for Windows 11.
And that’s how I ended up with Mint on my desktop and laptop a couple months ago.
I have to use Windows for work, but my personal machines are Linux and macOS at this point, and I have zero intention of buying another windows license.
Just moved my parents onto Mint, they were hesitant at first but now doing great. MS is digging it’s own grave.
My 80 yr old mother got a laptop recently, W11. I downgraded to W10 LTSC, and dual boot with Mint, and ran Chris Titus’ win util to decrapify. Two weeks later she had allowed windows to trick her into upgrading to W11 again.
She’s been using computers since the 70’s, and owned PCs since the DOS era, but she just doesn’t want to bother with anything but using her PC in autopilot mode. Couldn’t care less about exploring Mint.
I also just replaced Windows 10 with Mint recently. I did sadly buy Windows 11 proper at some point for my new office PC, which thankfully has been okay after I turn off the copilot shit. And I’m stuck with it until a few programs get some Linux support.
But regardless, I sure won’t be buying anything more from Windows.
I’m not sure what your use cases and performance requirements are, but Windows works great in a VM.
I rarely use it, but I happened to fire it up today and after updating it I got a full screen ad to start backing up my computer to their shit.
Today is a good day to try Linux.
(maybe best to start with Mint or Ubuntu? At least that’s how I did. They have a “live” version you can try out before committing to it)
Do you have a few minutes to talk about our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds?
a few years ago I had a really stupid issue with my laptop. about twice a year, for whatever reason, Windows 11 decided my internal wifi card wasn’t worth existing and would just wipe it off the face of the earth. Just completely remove it, delete the drivers, everything. hard resetting the laptop didn’t work, physically unplugging and replugging the card back in didn’t work, manually installing the drivers didn’t work. the ONLY way Windows would accept the card again was on a fresh OS install. So twice a year, like clockwork, i’d have to do that except the last time I couldn’t because I needed an MS account. well I couldn’t get online. for whatever reason it wouldn’t allow me to connect to wifi and I didn’t have access to an eithernet connection. So I gave up and finally decided to give this Linux thing a try. Installed Mint within 15min.
The added bonus of installing Linux on the laptop was it suddenly brought my battery back to life. on Windows I MAYBE got 30min out of a full charge. On Linux with a WM like Niri it’s now a few hours. Linux also made me fall in love with the PC again. Now I’m on NixOS and i just love configuring my system or doing more dev work with ease thanks to nixshells.
Linux also made me love computing again!! So fun actually knowing your machine and being totally free to break it completely.
The best thing about breaking it is having a chance to set it up again more efficiently
Praise be!
I always have time to talk about The Admin. Should I make some
teacoffee to sip as we talk?Ha, “The Admin” brought to mind something I haven’t thought about in years…
Ohh…
I need to find these books.
Thank you.
Milk and sugar please.
I ran into my first people doing that for Jesus in many years last weekend. Was so bizarre. They just approached me randomly on the street.
Filthy heretics!
No, im sorry I dont have time for that, but have you heard of Linus Torvalds?
Only if you have a few minuets to talk about our Lord and Savoir Theo de Raadt
Don’t forget stallman! (Yes I know about the scandals but dude did contribute essential software and ideas of libre to the foss community).
In capitalist USA the computer own you… Or something like this?
In Soviet Linux, you own PC
In American Windows, PC own you
Dear Micro$lop: Quit trying to make it happen
I’m sure the fact that the Steam Hardware Survey just hit 5.33% Linux has absolutely NOTHING to do with Microsoft’s continued pants-on-head stupid and anti-consumer approach to things.
Nah, Hanlon’s razor has worn put here.
Microsoft probably knows what they’re doing with their anti-customer approach… and it’s nothing good.
If by “complicates… basic PC ownership” they mean “infringes on your property rights as a computer owner,” then they’re finally catching on to what I’ve been saying for damn near a decade.
You should not accept having an abusive relationship with your operating system, and that’s what Windows has been since at least 8 (when they started infecting it with “telemetry”), if not earlier. Have some goddamn self-respect, people! Kick Microsoft to the curb!
Google onboarding on Android…
The key difference is that there are credible alternatives in the PC OS space. If I could ditch Android/iOS without major pain, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
and it can be skipped. for now.
Root and use custom roms.
Only works if your device has an unlockable bootloader, and most phones nowadays are completely locked down.
Most but not all. If someone cares THAT much about making a free account and telemetry, a few minutes on XDA won’t hurt their schedule.
That’s the direction that many manufacturers are trying to push PCs as well.
alas, most models of android phones don’t have support from the custom roms that currently exist
If, the roms exist, there’s clearly hardware for them…
And what should you suggest we should do with the ones that don’t? Bury them all at some landfill?
Well, they were born e-waste, so yea. If the consumer is in middle of the lake of information, but refuses to drink anything but bottled corpo propaganda and dies from dehydration…
Also win8: Hey, would you like NOT having a desktop? We’ve got tiles now!
I literally just recommended CachyOS to my boss while we were complaining about Windows 11 in our one on one meeting today
It’s like that vegan joke. How will you know if someone is a linux user? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
Especially Arch users.
Which I do not use.
I, on the other hand, do use Arch, btw :P
THE PROPHECY HAS COME TO PASS.
how the turntables
I mean I don’t really recommend Linux like a lot of people do. I just mention it when it’s appropriate and give a list of its drawbacks and benefits, according to specific use case. For home users I just say that Linux Mint or Zorin OS are fine and even better that Windows for this scenario, but I must be honest and also say that something like ChromeOS might be even better if an user spends their whole time in a web browser.
For professional usage (except coding lol) I never recommend or even mention Linux for variety of reasons.
Microsoft doing their part to get people to move to Linux
More “Microsoft doing their part to get people used to the idea of having to login with an internet connection so that they can make Windows 12 subscription based.”
Thats what this bullshit is. Training the user base for OSaaS.
And they will have enterprise by the balls because they control like 90% of the enterprise market. The consumers, they could give a fuck if they take it or leave it. Windows licensing is such an teeny tiny part of the equation that screaming at them is going to get as much traction as screaming at Nvidia for the fact that a midrange GPU is 1000 bucks now. Nvidia doesnt care if their consumer gpu market disappears tomorrow, they’ve got the AI fucks locked in.
Wow. This is absolutely has to be the reason. There is nothing better than a recurrent revenue stream. Look at Spotify, Netflix business model.
Really. And even better, now they can granularize Windows even further. Windows 11 Home or Pro? Naw fam, that’s not enough. You’ll have the baseline Windows 12 sub for $10 per month…seems reasonable, right? Except that’s the baseline. That’s the version that can only make use of, at maximum, 4 CPU cores. Want to use all the cores in your bomb ass new processor? You need to bump up to the $20 per month subscription which includes the CPU-MAX add on. Not a fan of the basic Windows wallpaper? Well, fret not! You just need to download the Personalization add-on for an additional $5 per month and now you can change your wallpaper. Hey, is that a new GPU you got there? Yeah, you’re going to need to spring for the Gamer bundle…$20 a month for that, on top of the base sub. Oh and don’t forget about your local storage…they can subscription lock that, too. “You don’t even need local storage anyway! Just use OneDrive!!! It’s only a few bucks extra per month!!”…deliberately priced far less than the local storage subscription so that they can scrape all your shit for marketable data which you’ll see in the fine print of the ToS they’re allowed to do with abandon.
Go to turn on HDR…“sorry, you need the graphics booster add on”. Try to output 5.1 audio? “Sorry, no can do, you get 2.0 only, peasant, you didn’t sign up for the media add-on.” Want to throw another stick of memory in your rig to extend it’s life? “Sorry, base Windows can only use 16GBs…you need the performance package to address anything more.”
And you know what the best part is? This shit would all likely be legal. Know how I know? Because Windows enterprise server and software licensing is already like this, and has been for years.
Shit is so fucked man…
Heated seats in luxury cars.
Chris Titus’ windows utility will decrapify Windows quite a bit, including removing telemetry, copilot and much more stuff for those unable/unwilling to move to Linux.
For those a bit more adventurous he provides a Microwin install image creator that tweaks a standard ISO to be as light as possible, removing as much crap as possible during install, making install un atended, and creating a local account.
Oh? Who would have thought? I sometimes wonder what kind of limbo people live in that this hasn’t been the clear picture for most since Windows 7.
Social inertia.
Yeah, led like sheep by the illusion of convenience. It is sad.
I’ve been reading all over the place how people are finally becoming more aware of the lack of privacy, but I scratched that as me always seeing this because I mostly interact in privacy and security related environments.
However, the least likely person I know to be concerned about these factors is my brother, as he’s all about convenience and ‘glamour’. Well, he called me on Sunday to ask me if I suggested that he flashed “that operating system you use on your phone” (GrapheneOS) on his device, and asked if I knew what proton was 🤣 only to mention that he had found that and was in the process of dropping gmail. Imagine my surprise when this guy is calling for this.
What I’m trying to say is that, if my brother is suddenly concerned about his digital privacy and security, I am certain 50% of Normie’s out there are as well, or will be pretty soon.
I genuinely believe that we’re living in a pivotal moment in digital philosophy across all realms, people are finally waking up from the convenience slumber, and my hope is that this will help shift the discourse all over the place, and we can all expect more of the people in our environments start asking questions about how to fly under the radar.
This is the actual reason i didn’t end up going with win11, and tried Linux. Seemed like about a similar amount of bullshit to get to know my way around linux as it did doing regedits and getting around using an account.
I am now firmly in the camp of every option being terrible in some way.
Still using bazzite though, so it’s not worse.
Bazzite is underrated, its a great desktop os out of the box with solid gaming support.
Well, sure. Still had a bunch of unexpected weird stuff.
Genuine question, what was “unexpected/weird” for you?
I don’t disagree, in fact I’m in a similar situation coming to Bazzite from Windows. But I’d like to know what your experience has been like so far, Maybe I will learn something.
My own personal gripe is that they removed Discover in favor of their own store “bazzar” and I feel its just worse in every way so I tried to put it back and now Discover will “launch” and immediately crash.
Monitor snapping issues (program opens on the wrong monitor and figuring out how to force it somewhere else), VPN program not working because it’s an immutable distro, Stream deck unexpected behaviour (What functions can it use, sometimes it disconnected on a different usb hub) etc. Also some incompatibilities, can’t use fusion 360 (didn’t work at all last time i tried it)
There are a few others but those come to mind.
I have found Proton VPN works for me none of the others I’ve tried seem to function. I’m using it on a my livingroom pc so I don’t have any input on the steam deck specific issues, in fact I prefer Steam OS and I wish there was an official desktop release already.
I use windscribe. Happy so far, and direct connection works well enough. Also stReam deck (Elgato). It works pretty well on my Legion go too.
Windows 11 has given me so many headaches at work I have genuinely explored moving the entire corporate environment to Linux. Unfortunately it would be a massive multi-year operation that would not bring the amount of benefits required to get such a thing greenlighted. But simply the fact that I, and many peers, took a good hard look at it tells you just how incredibly shit Windows 11 is. It’s a fucking nightmare on so many levels, it’s ridiculous.
They know that, that’s why they do it… And that’s why you should go ahead with it…
Yeah I’m in a (primarily) Windows shop too, but we have many Linux servers that I manage and maintain. My DD at home is CachyOS, and I’m very familiar with management of a fleet of Ubuntu servers. I’ve already told the guys on my team I’m ready to just switch at work too. Might cause me some management issues at times though because of needing Windows Server management tools (e.g. RSAT), but I suppose I could jump box that.
Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC is supported until 2032 and free to activate.
And what does that accomplish? Delaying the actual problem to 2032?
It gives you 6 years to transition to a better OS. Or to become CEO of Microslop and improve things.
It’s honestly great, even for me who only boot into windows once every few months.
I wouldn’t say “great”. But great in comparison to 11 😁 But who needs 6 years of transition? The run-of-the-mill-user with office and Firefox could just switch and not even notice it. Despite libreoffice loading much quicker.
Great in the sense I don’t have to bother for 6 years for a partition I will use less than 24 hours over that period of time haha.
So far I’ve used it to scan once (for some reason that day skan decided to not work) and to make a windows install USB for my SO.
I tried Expedition 33 thinking performance issues were a Linux thing by no, it’s just like that.
So it’s a long term unlikely to be used OS, and for that long support is great.
True true. Can’t hurt to have. I went through great hassles to set up Linux besides my old win install and also made a VM out of it for those “I don’t wanna boot again”-moments.
Turns out, I never actually needed either. And I was surely deep into win and half of my tools were self made and now obsolete. Everything just works and works better, more comfy and even faster.
Actually, one more use case is my SO. Can’t/won’t use Linux, and I’m not fighting. But needs an up to date OS on the ancient lappet laptop, so 10 IOT it is.
Unless she’s a pro, why does she even care? My wifey would just want her browser, mails and is already using libreoffice. Browser looks the same as win, so could the whole OS if one prefers.
But yeah sure, wouldn’t force her to any OS either,I’m not suicidal 😁
But who needs 6 years of transition?
I’m hoping someone manages to make surface pro’s fully compatible with linux in that time… (or that something that’s compatible and serves SPs purpose becomes available)
Probably rather the latter 😁 But yes, sure. Valid point. Nice devices but too locked
It delays the problem for six more years, and it also gives me the satisfaction of
piratingtesting the only decent version of Windows free of Microslop bloat and vibe coded react.the only decent version of Windows
Please stop romanticising Win 10 just because it’s less shitty than 11. There is no decent Windows.
Reminder: Win 10 introduced
- mandatory telemetry (you can only choose between some telemetry and firehose telemetry)
- a built-in keylogger
- built-in advertising
- aggressive nag screens containing dark patterns trying to trick users into “upgrading”
Reminder that they backported the Windows 10 telemetry to Windows 7 as well.
Yup. That’s what made me ditch Win 7 long before EOL and switch to Linux. Been here for ten years now. Life’s good. 🌱
The last good Windows was Windows 98
For people with a BSOD fetish? Definitely!
Don’t yuck my yum
I’m not. It’s just… why can’t you play with penguins like the other boys?
Exactly. It just delays the inevitable (maybe even sooner if something denies to run on “this old unsupported version”). As an old win-lover I never thought I’d say this:
Better switch to Linux, most of everything windows still works, everything else is just better and faster.
Gives 6 more years for Adobe and my online games to start supporting Linux D: (or the Adobe alternatives to become more suitable for professional use)
I can’t help you with the games. You could vote with your wallet and just not play those specific ones. Start hitting that backlog of games you got on sale and never opened.
Regarding Adobe suite in a professional manner, I’m pretty sure they work on MacOS.
You always have choices. They may not be perfect but they do exist nonetheless. These companies will never stop being invasive if users keep giving in. Until “number go down” in board meetings, nothing changes.
You could vote with your wallet and just not play those specific ones.
Oh I’m not paying for them, but still one of my main daily drivers is Genshin, and I haven’t found such an enjoyable open world exploration in any other game I’ve tried. (I’m PC-only so haven’t tried Breath of the Wild.)
Regarding Adobe suite in a professional manner, I’m pretty sure they work on MacOS.
I would never touch a Mac, it’s way more of a walled garden than Windows.
Also I was talking about Adobe alternatives like Inkscape for Illustrator or Scribus for InDesign. From what I’ve read they are really not there yet. (Tried Inkscape a few times, but the UI is so unintuitive for my brain used to Adobe’s UI/workflow 😭)
Genshin is playable on Linux? I play it on my Steam Deck.
Thanks, that’s good to know! From what I’ve read a few months ago when I last looked into it, it only worked with a fan-made launcher that posed a ban risk and also broke every few updates.
I just add the official launcher as a non-steam game and ran through the install as normal.
Granted I haven’t done it in a couple of months, so not sure if that method still works…but I don’t see why not
Not played genshin yet, but you might like where winds meet? Incredibly beautiful, good combat, exploring is rewarding. And totally free. And runs wonderfully on Linux, even with HDR.
Dunno about current adobes, but don’t they also run fine via wine? Have only one single tool so far that makes a bit trouble (mediamonkey).
Thanks, I’ll check out Where Winds Meet! :)
(Edit: according to their Steam page they use genAI dialogue and art, so that’s a pass :/ )
Dunno about current adobes, but don’t they also run fine via wine? Have only one single tool so far that makes a bit trouble (mediamonkey).
From the reports I see on WineHQ, they are all various levels of broken, though the last versions tested were from 2024.
Honestly I recently only used some portable warezed one. CC6 or 2024 or whatever they call their shit now. I lost interest when they switched to that cloud-nonsense. Which is sad because I was there when they introduced Photoshop and i loved it. Newer than 2024 will probably just be worse. I’d bet they put a lot of effort in their DRM which naturally breaks things
Oh I’m not paying for them, but still one of my main daily drivers is Genshin, and I haven’t found such an enjoyable open world exploration in any other game I’ve tried.
Genshin Impact works on Linux: https://lutris.net/games/genshin-impact/
(I’m PC-only so haven’t tried Breath of the Wild.)
I’m Linux only and I’ve played Breath of the Wilds (works on Windows too).
Go to your favorite torrent site (1337x to) and search for Breath of the Wild. It’ll be packaged with the emulator so you don’t need to do anything. It’s a better experience, higher framerate, antialiasing, 4k upscaling and reverse tonemapping (Windows calls this autoHDR) (and basically anything that you can do with ReShade)
Also I was talking about Adobe alternatives like Inkscape for Illustrator or Scribus for InDesign. From what I’ve read they are really not there yet. (Tried Inkscape a few times, but the UI is so unintuitive for my brain used to Adobe’s UI/workflow 😭)
A few months ago someone made a patch which makes the Adobe CC 2021 and 2025 installer work in Wine.
Come on in, the Linux water is fine :)
I always thought of Macs as not a good value before, but nowadays for laptops at least they seem to be relatively good.
I still find them annoyingly unintuitive, but that’s probably due to lack of experience. At least they come with some (old) version of bash and support standard stuff like ssh out of the box from my understanding.
I still find them annoyingly unintuitive
Haha yes, when I had to use a Mac once in uni it was like they made a point of doing everything just different enough from Windows to be annoying, like why are the window close buttons on the left?!
I play heavily modded games and it’s a hassle to make some of them work in Linux. Ltsc helps me give some time until modding in Linux gets better support.
That was my biggest gaming-fear when switching. Turned out, it all just works too. So far at least. Wow, satisfactory, core keeper, subnautica and some others.
Even cheatengine and the modmanagers all worked fine.
The only thing I’ve found not working so far is destiny2. But they can go fuck themselves anyway.
It gives us 6 years to grow the Linux user base so that software devs, game devs, etc. make their products with Linux specifically in mind instead of creating poor ports or excluding the OS entirely.
Linux adoption is only going up.
fair point, and I do hope so…
LTSC is pretty much what Windows should be. And MS hates people are using it so it means it’s the best choice.
Was it a hoax that Microsoft came after Massgrave?
I’m in the process of getting my kids their first PC this Christmas. They’ll both get a mini-PC, with severely restricted Internet access. I’m actually thinking about just letting them connect to the home server where I’d mock the Web sites I pick for them. For this reason, Win11 with its online account requirement is automatically excluded from consideration. I wated to give them Mint anyway, but this was the argument that convinced my wife.
You should keep an eye on Gnome. Their recent release, Gnome 50, just introduced parental controls to limit access to programs and they’re looking to implement website access as well.
I don’t like Gnome, but my kid’s first PC will have Gnome on it now because of these new features, which I greatly appreciate
I think you should let the kid just use variety of systems and desktops over time. It’s fine if it likes something different than you in the end as well, and there’s a chance that they will like GNOME more if they are more used to mobile UI’s.
Mocking up whole websites seems like a pain. With a Pihole, you can create different service groups for computers and apply a whitelist to just their machines. Plus you get adblocking too!
Lol I assumed OP meant mock as in “You want to go to tiktok? What a horrible site. You have bad taste.”
You should do that as well, to protect the kids from those brain rot slop websites
Yeah, could also have two Pi-Hole instances. One is network wide and block ads for everyone, and the other is the DNS the kids PCs use, set with a white list of approved sites only. You can set Pi-hole to block everything (set * as the a RegEx filter) and then add domains to the white list to be allowed through.
Groups is probably more efficient but two instances could be offer more options/nuance on how you run things.
I tried pi-hole, but it turned in a real pain, trying to set it up for normal use, plus two WFH offices. I may give it another try, when I feel more patient.
The idea of mocking websites came from talking to other parents from my kids’ school. I was thinking about some form of a local “internet” for our neighbourhood for all the kids. Heavily curated, a mix of mock sites (like the full download of Wikipedia), news through RSS, moderated message boards, etc. I don’t think it’s an original idea given the current state of the Internet, so at this stage I’m just reading up on design best practices.
In the past, I’ve used Adguard Home, and I liked it. When I tried to my Adguard server as the DNS for my router, though, my WFH corporate VPN wouldn’t connect, so there’s that. Granted, I was using it to remove ads, but people seem to like it for parental controls too.
Whoa. Parents…. Parenting??
In all seriousness, if more parents were proactive like you, we wouldn’t have all this under 16 social media ban and shit.
I saw a deal for a pair of mini PCs with decent specs on eBay right after I got my annual bonus, so I jumped on it because I want to do the same thing for my kids. May be jumping the gun a bit…my son just learned the alphabet (uppercase only) and my daughter just learned how to flop off the couch head-first.
It’s a hell of a moment when they can out perform their parents, isn’t it?
My wife taught my son English uppercase letters, so I’ve been teaching him Greek lowercases. I can’t help but feel proud every time he says “pi”
…but who taught her to flop off the couch? That sounds like an aunt or uncle.
She independently discovered it haha. I sit her down on the couch next to me while I’m working, and she constantly flops over. It drives me nuts! I would let her just do her thing, but she’s got pretty bad reflux and even just a minute or two of tummy time within like 2 hours of having a bottle will make her ralph.
The other day, I had to get up for a minute or two, and I left her on the couch. My better judgment kicked in and I pushed an ottoman next to the couch to block the space she usually tries to launch into. This is what I came back to see:
My kids are a little older - just learned to read without sounding off the words - so I need to introduce parental controls. But you may see your purchase as an investment: a year from now, the hardware may be worth twice as much.
That’s the main reason I jumped on them. I’ve seen an increasing trend of people selling old computers with the RAM and HDDs taken out
Just put 3.1 on those and let them play solitaire to their hearts content.
If they get Windows 95, they can also play Hearts to their Solitaire’s content.
Windows 95 with the Microsoft Entertainment Pack
I have a working emachines desktop with Win98. They’ll pry it off my cold, dead hands…
My kids’ devices are blocked from internet access in my OpenWRT firewall and I run a Squid proxy on my server with an allowlist of domains they can access.
Smart move, with the brain rot cancer that internet has become these days, it’s best to keep your kids away from it until their brains finish developing a bit
