Man, this is genuinely painful to watch unfold… Yeah, yeah, Linux, I know, already started migrating, but let your feelings speak for a second, sib!
Think back to how much joy and sheer functionality Windows used to encompass. Even Vista, I swear! It was a poorly optimised mess bloated to hell and back with overlapping features, but it was bursting with a genuine desire to innovate. I honestly don’t remember ever having as bad a time with Vista as I do with 10, even when I used to run it on an overheating MSI.
Not to mention XP and 7, which were, I dare say, the best operating systems I’ve ever used, almost interchangeably if we go for XP SP3 with more unofficial tweaks. I’m not trying to diminish the improvements brought on by 8 and 10, they did have some much needed upgrades for vital features and functionalities, that’s undeniable. But everything good came wrapped up (or, rather, jumbled up like 10 sets of wired earbuds you just found in a pocket of the coat you pulled out of the washing machine) with sooo much intrusive crap, that it defeats the purpose…
Gotta grieve that shit…
I’d been a Windows user for around 30 years and I’d probably qualify as a fanboy. I’m sure I hit all seven stages of grief to some extent over Windows’ enshittification.
But switching to Linux has given me all the good feelings about my computer. So I’m good now.
This is how I mourn https://gitgud.io/wackyideas/aerothemeplasma/
omg that’s actually beautiful, will be installing later
Uuu, shiny! Thank you!
You’re welcome!
Ho-ly, the dedication.
ik, wackyideas is truly an artist.
Switching from Windows to Linux about 25 years or so ago was when I finally realized that computers actually behave in deterministic ways so no, Windows was never really a joy to use.
Yeah like XP was way better than windows now, and 7 was mostly fine in retrospect, but even as a gamer who always used windows, but had experimented with linux, I always knew windows was shit even back in the XP days. I remember doing so much debloating and random troubleshooting.
And most of the troubleshooting was just stuff like “reboot, reinstall, remove and re-add printer,…” which really does nothing to the actual issue and just fights symptoms.
Figure it out.
I can mind the popups and ads but its the surveillance that I don’t like. Mc recall was the whole reason I deleted my os and got arch
Anon’s on 4chan. He literally just has to go from v to g to have a treasure trove of information on how to not deal with this exact problem.
Horrendously racist term aside, I feel for this dude. I’ve logged into Microsoft’s support forums more than a few times specifically to call out and report the mindless idiots who keep marking their own unhelpful comments as “solutions.”
Help me, which term is racist?
I think ‘jeets’ means Indian from the contexts of other greentexts I’ve seen. But I’m not sure why
it’s short for Pajeet, which is a somewhat common Indian first name. I associate it with UK racism more than US racism for some reason.
Oh, TIL - thanks!
That lines up. I’m in my fourth decade of life, always lived in the US, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen that word.
Though I don’t make a habit out of socializing with racists, so I can’t rule out that some people here might use it.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pajeet warning: racism (although, obvious right?)
It means cowfucker in this context
Windows is largely an Indian product, jeets is racist against Indians.
I literally just want Windows 7 again but with security updates, driver support, and back end technology upgrades.
For now I’m settling with Window’s current state with some Linux use mixed in with the intent to nearly fully migrate for my next desktop build. I’ll only use Windows for whatever games refuse to budge on anti-cheat, assuming by then I’m even still interested in playing pvp games at all considering how enshittified they are with engagement based matchmaking and FOMO battlepasses.
what about win10/11 ltsc?
No, they are bad. Boo windows 10 and the one that is even worse.
damn, I should’ve know that I’ll get this respond haha. I personally use dual boot Ubuntu 25.04 and win11 ltsc (cursed by some people’s standard I know but just hear me out I hate snap as much as you do) and I just thought win11 ltsc is the closest thing (the security updates, no AI, bloat bs) to what op was looking for from my experiences:
I literally just want Windows 7 again but with security updates, driver support, and back end technology upgrades.
I personally see Linux Mint exactly as a Windows 7 but with modern support (there is even a cool Aero theme for it) :P
I use mint in my stores so I am no mint hater, but I still find windows 7 to be a nicer user experience. And funny enough “modern support” is still seemingly a thing for my old windows 7 machine. I am often shocked at how well new hardware just works with it. I would have changed it to mint years ago if it showed even a hint of obsolescence, but it seems to just keep trucking on and on. The same can not be said for other windows machines I have tried to put on line (for fun I have done windows XP, vista, 8 and 2000).
In my case I didn’t have much luck with support for newer hardware, sadly. And as much as I love Mint I have to agree that no OS beats Windows 7 UX up to this date. But I even then, I personally don’t feel much safe using it nowadays because of security vulnerabilities (since it’s EOL), I had issues with ransomware on Win 10 so God knows what I would infect myself with on win 7 😁
It’s… It’s beautiful
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Like Glasswire i think it was? And Tinywall. That category is called application firewall.
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What made me switch permanently to Linux was the KDE Plasma Desktop Enviorment, using Archlinux (SomeOrdinaryGamers had this as his setup.) Basically has what I love about windows 7, and more. Even the desktop widgets!
For me, learning the GUI isn’t the biggest issue but taking full advantage of my hardware and some online game’s anti-cheat.
I know Linux driver support that Nvidia has put out has brought it to a pretty good place, but my understanding is that its still not at parity and there is a performance impact to switching.
Can’t say much on the technical shit, but I’ve only had one game perform worse on linux. Most actually seem to do better, and I have an nvidia card. Though I don’t play much in the way of multi-player or online stuff, so mileage may vary.
Fair enough, maybe I could give it another try.
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I know, I own one. I just also have a desktop with a 4070 super.
The performance issue is there’s no frame gen with DLSS yet. Other than that, I get better performance from my NVIDIA card on Linux than I do on windows.
It’s a big incentive for me to make my next card upgrade an AMD card. That’s already a laundry list of other good reasons to do so nowadays, but it’s real hard to justify buying a graphics card in this economy.
I still use 7 on my media PC in the living room. Its wild how much better it still is to use. Gamepass seems to be all that is keeping one PC in my home running windows 10, and when that ends so will my use. Never going to 11.
Window’s 11 is pretty annoying to use on various levels. I only upgraded to it because my brother encouraged me. Hes always been a little bit of a mainstream tech cheerleader though. Hes always cheered on Intel, Nvidia, and Windows. Its funny though right now I (somewhat resentfully) have an Nvidia because of my performance demand and he has a Radeon because of budget.
I think I might need to start trusting myself on my hardware searches a lot more. Of course I probably wont be buying new hardware for a while anyway.
Unless that windows 7 computer is entirely air-gapped from your network, you should switch it to Linux or Windows 10 (which is going out of support in October).
Even if you have it on a separate VLAN or have it restricted from accessing the internet, there are attacks that can use another device on the network as a starting point for attacks.
Having a Windows 7 computer anywhere near your network is an enormous security risk. And one that is frankly not worth it, given the alternatives that exist.
Ha, no it is not. As someone who worked many years in the industry, nothing is really secure but also nothing is really attacked in that way anymore. (Unless you think people are going around warwalking looking for vulnerabilities in private networks). There are are still many networked devices running old windows even now (in some really sensitive areas as well). The constant fear mongering about security updates from Microsoft being anything but too little/too late is just crap talk to keep people employed.
The main risk currently is social engineering, to a degree that (outside major nations/companies) the other attack vectors are a rounding error. You and anyone else worth less then a few millions best approach to online security is to back up often, change passwords often, and don’t click links in emails.
I’ve been using windows my entire life and have never run into any of the issues Linux users talk about all the time.
Lucky you.
I just had to use my job’s OEM device to connect to our new contactor’s site since it doesn’t work with my machines for some reason (standard deb stable and a popos machine). When I boot into it the lock screen was so overwhelming with weather info, news and other junk I just had to laugh. Its crazy how much junk you need to disable to have a usable device. I haven’t really seen vanilla windows for awhile, but it seemed like Vegas slot machine with how many notifications I was getting.
We may call it junk, but a lot of users want those kinds of features.
It also isn’t an “unusable device” just because it shows if it is going to be cloudy. Stop being so pedantic.
And all of it can easily be disabled with a simple easy-to-find setting. But it is on by default because a majority of users don’t look into their settings and thus wouldn’t know it is available.
You have to remember that Windows was made for non-tech savvy users. Not for you and me.
a lot of users want those kinds of features
I had to re-enable them on computers at my company. I changed a policy to get rid of it and by the end of the day I had a dozen or so emails (~10% of the company) asking for them back.
YMMV of course and I don’t personally like them. But a lot of people actually do. I think a lot of the people in communities like this forget how much of a power user they really are, and what actual users really want.
I mean it was 4 years ago (still 10) and in rough EU area (luckily, nobody but Apple cares enough to not include Swiss) so it was no that bad. But it was a developer device with admin rights, so everything that popped up a notification without good reason got removed.
Btw, every and each driver vendor installs a background service “for updates” on Windows, that tracks you and occasionally shows ads or flips out to eat all CPU. You can just copy the driver file, uninstall that crap and install the driver file via HWManager. Sorry, i don’t remember the file extension, have to google it.
I have a Win11 ThinkPad for work, so I get MS ads, Lenovo ads, and 2 or 3 versions each of Teams and Outlook. We use SharePoint, so when I open a file from there via the web interface, I don’t want to deal with that BS for printing. Depending if it’s Word or Excel, the button/link for opening in the desktop app will be located differently (or maybe it’s based on editing permissions), but it never fails to throw a dialog saying it couldn’t open the file in desktop mode and asking if i want to cancel or try again…just before the desktop app opens.
Some of these things don’t happen every day, but they all happen every week, and anyone who doesn’t see a problem with that hasn’t used a half-decent OS (and I’m willing to include early-release Win10 in that group, telemetry and Cortana notwithstanding).
I dont think annon is a Linux user
I don’t know of anyone who uses any other OS that complain about windows the way Linux users do
Have you seen Windows users? Most of them here Windows
EDIT: was trying to embed this gif, but not having any luck, so just linking it instead
Got a new rog recently. The included bloatware, I think it was antivirus but I don’t remember, made games (the thing it was designed for) basically unplayable. There would be random MASSIVE keyboard lag, like I would stop holding W and my character would keep running for several seconds. The mouse had no such issue so I could turn to mitigate, but fuck me it took a while to find the answer. And they’re SHIPPING that shit.
This is why I run MAGA Linux with the Kristi Gnome desktop. Problem is my Java imports cost more.
Oh shit if you have a dog you need to shut down the computer right now no time to explain
i dont even know this comment can be called. Politically-online? that Doesnt integrate the linux bit though only the irony and the politics 😭 you’ve created art today jaybone.
Reminds me of when I use to watch leftist political streamers 24/7 (mainly Vaush). Good thing I stopped watching, no matter how depressed afterwards I was.
Better than Python import tarrifs.
It’s not as bad as people make out, but buying a brand new Windows machine is a pretty annoying experience.
I’m on Windows 11 and I don’t recall ever seeing a pop-up like this but it looks like a standard notification from the Microsoft Store App, which means it SHOULD be possible to suppress by turning off notifications for that app (Open Settings, go to System -> Notifications -> Microsoft Store and just set the toggle to “Off”).
Yes, that turns off ALL Notifications for the Store App, but it doesn’t really have any useful ones anyways so it’s not a big loss.
I always take these posts with a huge grain of salt. I have installed Windows 11 in two PCs so far and never seen these things happen. I don’t see no candy crush or nonsense installed save for some microsoft apps. I then proceed to delete what I don’t want and turn off tips and suggestions. After doing that it never has bothered me again…
now that is a well-boiled frog
Could well be European. EU Windows installs are significantly less bloaty than shit than US installs are.
I believe this is very true. I’m from Europe and nothing in the greentext made any sense to me. Never seen a Windows install with any of the mentioned “features”.
Forget the “bloat”. Windows has an advertisements engine. I’m not talking about some stupid OEM bullshit bundled thing… I’m saying the operating system itself.
My OS (that I fucking paid for, no less) shouldn’t be piping me advertisements and it sure as shit shouldn’t be harvesting screenshots to train an AI model.
Then just disable suggestions with a simple checkbox in the settings.
Windows only has ads if you let it.
You can be upset about 2 things: where things are, and where things are going.
It’s become very fashionable to ignore a trajectory. “Build 3 more prisons in El Salvador”.
The issue isn’t that at this moment I can opt-out. The issue is that the infrastructure inevitably demands usage.
If you’re not upset you’re a collaborator.
I didn’t even let my latest laptop boot to Windows when I first turned it on, the Linux USB stick went in right away. But for those who use Windows for one reason or another, always perform a clean install; manufacturers love including all sorts of crap by default.
theres also these fantastic tools: https://privacy.sexy/ https://github.com/builtbybel/Bloatynosy/releases https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
Not FOSS: https://winaero.com/download-winaero-tweaker/
Someone’s curated list: https://github.com/TemporalAgent7/awesome-windows-privacy
My laptop booted in to Windows once. I missed my first guess on the key to enter setup and USB storage didn’t have a higher boot order than internal storage.
I wanted to check if everything worked correctly out of the box (and not have trouble with any warranty if it didn’t), and doing the initial round of bios updates was easier on windows. So, I booted to windows, played around a bit, and then installed Linux.
Just use an enterprise edition and then CTT cleanup tool.
How much extra does that cost?
Just use the mass activation script. It doesn’t cost anything
Where does one just use such edition?
In Germany you just purchase an OEM volume license on eBay for 8€. That’s why I don’t give a shit about all this drama, lol. I’m still switching to Linux once I find the time to do so, because I don’t want to support American companies any further.
In Germany you just purchase an OEM volume license on eBay for 8€
[X]Doubt
Having purchased $8 keys on eBay, they’re more than likely either data center or MAK activation keys that are being resold against the license agreement.
Not that I care, mind, but there’s very little likelihood that a real/legit key being sold for that little that’s actually OEM.
Edit: IMHO, there isn’t much difference in buying a grey market key vs just using the activation script.
The license agreement doesn’t mean shit here though. Its perfectly legal. They’re perfectly valid and official keys.
May I also recommend dusting off the old pirate hat?
Oh, and group policies. I could not work on a system without turning all sorts of shit off in gpedit.
Mass Activation Script
Today I booted my work laptop to be greeted with a fucken ad glazing AI and trying to tell me its the future. Its junk microsoft and you cannot convince me otherwise.
Work laptop = not your problem
I’m in the same situation. If I wanna dick around on the internet at work, I have my phone and personal laptop, which happens to be a Thinkpad T14 G1 (running LMDE 6) and blends right in.
I remember some linux laptops my employer handed out to devs that absolutely needed them. Horrendously outdated and misconfigured, half-assed ports of the company software, you had to have a second laptop to read the knowledge base if it broke again. Not fun. Imagine all the shitshow of corporate windows, but with 1/100th the budget.
Yikes. How’d that get resolved? If at all?
Hah. I made it work enough to do my work, and handed it in as soon as I was done
Windows peaked at XP. Vista was the plateau on the other side, followed by the sheer cliff of windows 7.
10 introduced a bunch of cool stuff that made it seem like it was going places: WSL, the new terminal, multiple desktops. If you’re able to ignore the sad state of the control panel and settings apps, 10 was peak windows experience (feature-wise).
Then 11 came around and fucked everything up. As someone who subscribed to MS Insider to run beta builds of windows and get updates earlier, win 11 was the first iteration that really felt like there was just no upside to it. It was exactly the same as win10, but with some features removed and a much heavier hardware requirement. Even Vista (microsoft’s most successful OS) had some cool stuff going for it back in the day, but win11 was nothing but one disappointment after another. Shit it wouldn’t even let you keep a clock on the second screen until like a year after release.
Windows 7 was pretty damn good.
What? Windows 7 was probably the best version of windows ever just ahead of 2000.
Windows 8 was where the cliff was.
People look back at XP through rose tinted glasses. It was incredibly insecure in every way. Vista made the security architecture changes needed. Windows 7 was polish on top.
Windows 8 was where metro, start menu ads, auto installing unwanted apps, and ruining Windows control panel / settings happened.
XP was just 2000 with a teletubby desktop. I absolutely hated it.
you take that back!
Bliss is beautiful >:c
They’re right though, XP’s Luna was garbage.
I liked it. But I also used the “classic” interface anyway, so…
Whatever Windows you matured with is the best Windows. Mine was Windows 2000. Thanks, Dad 😂
Except ME. We don’t talk about that one…
So, DOS?
DOS isn’t Windows. Consumer versions of Windows happened to run on top of DOS until XP was released in 2001.
Maybe I should rephrase: the OS you matured with is the best OS.
Half the programs I needed to use in Windows 3.1, and 3.11 required a DOS prompt to run. It wasn’t until NT that almost all software caught up enough to not need that DOS prompt so much. Although AutoCAD R9 ran like crap in NT on the 386 with math co-processor. So I needed to reboot into DOS every time I needed CAD.
Prolly, I don’t really remember tbh.
That makes sense. Lol.
