What’s the big deal with Windows 11?
I don’t use either win 10 nor win 11 much but I do know that I barely notice the difference.
I thought it was just a start menu rearrangement or something.
There’s a lot more telemetry. They’re stuffing ads into it (start menu, explorer panels, etc). They’re creeping generative cloud AI into it. The control panel/setting situation is unbelievably unfinished (for myself, all my audio devices take the name of other audio devices so they’re all working but mislabeled). A recent update broke all VPNs. High system requirements. Locking down features. Removal of customization. Buggy updates. Slow.
Not trying to defend Win11 too much here. But the system requirements aren’t bad until you see how much storage it needs and how much it needs for all of the unnecessary fancy junk they put in to have the “best Windows experience” like Windows Hello.
Microsoft initially wanted to get rid of Control Panel entirely, which would stick us to the bare set of options we’ve been seeing degrade since Windows 8.
How would you notice a difference in something you have no experience with?
I didn’t say I have no experience.
You don’t need to actively use something to have a general idea of it. Maybe it’s not on his machine but he sees friends/family use it. Maybe he’s seen ads, reviews, YouTube videos, articles.
I’ve never watched NASCAR in my life but I’m fairly certain I could point out differences between one of those cars and an F1 car.
This is the kind of thing people don’t get with others when they say that they haven’t watched a particular movie or played a particular game. Why bother when there’s quite a hefty amount of information out there to learn of them and judge based on that?
People love to trick others into these things by saying “You can’t judge a book by it’s cover!”.
Yes, yes you can actually. You just want people to waste time and money to validate their suspicions that whatever it is, will not be to their liking.
Yup, that’s why we have reviewers and whatnot, so I don’t need to spend my time and money on something that I most likely won’t like. Yeah, I probably miss some gems from time to time, but I’m not hurting for choice.
Anyone else think “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” is so weird in a literal sense? Lots of people judge books, music, movies, etc off the visual art associated with it. Otherwise graphic design wouldn’t exist.
They should have just kept incrementally upgrading W10. People don’t like big changes and there’s not much encouraging people to 11 except 10 going EOL.
Well yeah, but the problem is win 10 isn’t built from the ground up to be able to cater for ads inserted into your welcome bar, explorer bar, settings page, start menu and personalised ads … :( we live in the worse timeline dont we.
This isn’t the worst timeline. It was always destined to end up this way. Corporations consider themselves ethically mandated to squeeze as much profit out of customers as they can, to find the exactly monetary line where the number of customers they drive off is balanced by the money they can gain by the things that drove them off. They actually believe that, and that basically means any profit-seeking corporation is going to ruin their user experience in the long run.
IIRC, that was actually the plan. I remember Microsoft saying way back that 10 would be the last version of Windows and everything would be just upgrades to 10 moving forward.
System at a service. I remember that as well. Obviously they didn’t make as much money with it as they wanted to. Sooo they just draw an arbitrary line regarding supported CPUs, ditch Windoof 10, push 11, force users to upgrade their hardware and therefore often force them to buy new licenses and making new friends that way by starting that in the middle of the chip crisis. Then, captivating the user in their new OS, shoving ads down their throat, harvesting their data to make even more. What a shitshow.
The same story of publicly traded companies again and again.
Your steady growth isn’t good enough.
Your growth has to grow - and if it’s not growing fast enough then you’re not doing your duty to the shareholders.
Add in the fact that we’ve let businesses get so large they empty all the air from the room and we’ve managed to enshittify our entire society.
Which is exactly why I actually bought 10 instead of cheating an upgrade “hack” I figured out with XP that I then carried over to 10. I figured if it’s actually the last then it’s worth the 500 fucking dollars or whatever the hell it cost back then.
But no, they lied. I know surprise surprise a corporation lied.
Honestly, windows gamers upgrade to windows 11, Linux users stay on Linux, and everyone else is on android/ios and in no hurry to do anything about the laptop collecting dust most of the time.
Companies are also more likely to pay the extended support a year or two and update when the computer is replaced.
Its only on here on the fediverse people have time to complain about windows 11. (well some of the gamers might but more likely due to unstable systems on the newest i9 chips, since you launch steam, discord and a browser and alt tab between them… ignoring the start menu)
Here seems like people think everyone will say “welp, that’s it, going linux!”. Dude, most people I’ve talked about it, regular people who don’t spent their lives experimenting with tech, don’t even know what linux is
Why did the emoji picker of W11 get so fucking downgraded?
Seriously can someone fix this
And the windows+P multi monitor control doesn’t work before login in 11 because it’s part of the taskbar now
That’s weird. Do people not want ads in the computers they paid for begging them to subscribe to their own hardware? Do people not want LLM models watching everything they do and reporting back to headquarters? So perplexing. Welp, the users have spoken, hopefully Microsoft can figure out how to iterate. Maybe they want more ads and AI all over?
Once, I was asked if I wanted a special offer on Microsoft Office on boot up. Explorer freezes so often for me when I right-click a file and select Open With that it’s made me twitchy. Frequently image icons stop displaying. For a long while, every time I’ve installed Windows on a computer, I’ve had to go through and disable all the awful misfeatures Windows tries to put in the taskbar. I also always have to set OneDrive so it doesn’t redirect folders like Desktop and Documents into its cloud storage area. Now Windows 11 is threatening to put CoPilot on my desktop, and I’ll have to disable it too.
I’m positively longing for Linux now.
I had to do all the same things on my work computer. If MS could stop shitting all over my taskbar that would be an amazing expression of basic decency. I’m about to go to IT and ask for a Linux computer that I can test with my day to day tools to make sure everything works. Typically only a few devs have them and those of us in support roles are on Windows. Microsoft is literally sapping away the time and effort my employer has paid me to put towards their customers. I use Linux at home and it has none of these problems. Actually, the worst problem I’ve had in years was a broken package that I simply uninstalled and re-added from a different source.
Its a downgrade. It offers nothing but ads. Who wants ads? Why do they feel the need to keep altering the interface? If microsoft manufactured automobiles they would switch the brake and gas pedals every other year.
Maybe I’d they added more ads I’d be tempted to use it…
/S
No it needs more AI. Maybe AI-generated ads. The killer tech of 2024. The shareholders will be so pleased.
All the reviews (written by Ai) say that windows 11 is the bees knees!
I waited until the last day of support to upgrade from Windows 7 to 10, I plan on doing the same with Windows 10.
With Windows 10 and 11 Microsoft has been gradually removing control from the user’s hands and I’m still miffed about that.
I upgraded to 10 and my old laptop with a hard drive became unusable. I got multiple years of Linux from it instead of trashing it.
Yeah, modern Windows and HDDs don’t mix well. I refurbished multiple laptops and each time just throwing in a cheap SSD (and cleaning the cooler + sometimes reapplying thermal paste) would breathe new life into them.
That’s why I scope out for old laptops from time to time. It’s pointless to hope for it to run today’s Windows OSes. But to write it off as completely useless is stupid when you can throw any desired Linux distro on it.
Though I have noticed that Ubuntu does get harder to run on old laptops.
It’s been a gradual process and I do say that it started with Windows XP. People look at Windows XP with loads of nostalgia, but they conveniently forget how aggravatingly annoying it was with how often it kept prompting you about what you’re about to run. Like with the greyed out screens, asking whether you’re administrator and all that. It started with Windows XP.
And it has gotten worse since to where now this system you’ve paid $900 for that happen to have Windows pre-installed or maybe you bought that separately for another $200, so this $1,100 system you have. You can’t control it all.
I’ve already decided I’ll be going full Linux when Win10 reaches EOL.
I like it, I hope you do, too. If you decide to try beforehand I’d suggest a second machine or a VM. Apparently Windows is a massive pain when dual booting, like it commonly deactivates the Linux bootloader.
It slowed down my desktop experience significantly. Like it makes no sense at all. One day I’m working I solidworks on windows 10 and old computer at acceptable speed, the next I get assigned a new, bastly improved computer, with windows 11 and solidworks latest version, and it’s slow as fuck! I just want to end it sometimes. It lags, it crashes, it’s worthless! SW is worthless on its own, but with windows 11 its like 10 times worse. I think they are actually serving it on a server secretly and we are just remoting into it. It behaves almost exactly as when using remote desktop. It’s terrible and I want it gone!
I have Windows 11 on a couple of machines and honestly it’s just Windows 10 with a somewhat slicker taskbar and control panel. Functionally it is almost identical. I’m sure there is a random bunch of changes on the periphery but it’s really not a compelling proposition if someone has Windows 10 and is happy with it.
Nested right click Windows are a deal breaker on their own before any real issues even pop up
It enticed me to start gaming on Linux. So its definitely doing some enticing
I’ve started doing non-gaming on my steam deck. Not a lot but its let me use Linux in a very basic way.
I thought I was alone in this lol
Win11 literally made me rage uninstall it after I got mad trying to remove all bloatware and then it showed me onedrive ad
What was your experience switching over to Linux and getting it set up for gaming?
I switched over from Win10 to PopOS! about a month ago. It hasn’t been 100% painless but it’s leaps and bounds better than the last time I tried to switch 5-10 years ago. For reference I’m in an AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU, NVME drives for both the system and game drives, SATA for a data drive, NAS for media. I’ve only reinstalled once because I broke everything tinkering with different desktop environments, but it was an easy recovery with the install media.
All the correct drivers were installed from the get go. I managed to overwrite my cloud save for Horizon Forbidden West because of an issue mounting my game drive and mapping the correct install location in Steam, but that was 90% on me because I rejected the idea of making a backup copy of the files because “I know what I’m doing”. I ended up wiping my game drive entirely and reformatting it as EXT4 and haven’t had any problems since - the drive was NTFS before and had a handful of games already installed from Windows.
A couple games require finding the right Proton version to run it, but GE works flawlessly for most things I’ve tried. Everything has run as fast or faster than in Windows with the exception of WH4K: Darktide. There’s some microsecond delay in there somewhere that I couldn’t pin down. Didn’t seem to be video or network related. It’s the kind of thing that I bet I wouldn’t notice if it were my first time playing the game, but since I’ve got a couple hundred hours in it, it is just enough to throw me off and make me feel slightly drunk.
If you primarily game using Steam then it’s easier than ever on most popular distros. Biggest hassle is likely still GPU drivers. I’ve never had any issues there but depending on what card you have you may be better off with either proprietary or FOSS drivers depending on what your distro of choice likes to provide by default. After that most games tend to just work, a handful may require you to pick a beta version of proton or something.
If you want to try it and don’t want to do a lot of tinkering check out PopOS. It’s probably the friendliest distro for gaming out of the box.
I’ve heard a lot of people reference PopOS and Garuda as of the last few months but I’ve never heard of them. When you say popular distros I immediately think Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Suse, etc. Does your comment include those as well or when you say popular do you mean “popular for gaming”? Also how is the Linux support for external controllers?
To be fair outside of Proxmox and some Debian containers with Docker I haven’t spent much time in the Linux space for the last 7 or 8 years. I’m thinking about finally making the switch.
Popular distributions are the one you’re thinking about.
Some distributions advertise themselves as “gaming oriented” but you don’t need those, generalist distributions work just as well for gaming.
Pop_OS is based on Ubuntu. It’s developed by System76 which sells linux laptops that run their distro by default so it’s very well maintained and polished.
It’s a popular recommendation specifically for people looking out to try gaming on Linux because there are specific features built in like performance improvements for gaming and some gaming-specific packages whereas Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora and OpenSuse are generally designed to be a general purpose distro. Pop_OS delivers packages as flatpacks by default as opposed to Ubuntu’s snaps which are a bit controversial and also uses their Cosmic desktop environment by default (though as far as I know gnome, kde, xfce, etc all still work fine if you have a preference).
Mostly I recommend Pop_OS for people that are new to Linux, don’t know about why they might prefer one distro over another, and want to try it out with the minimal amount of hassle. If you aren’t gaming Pop_OS is still great but that’s one of it’s selling points.
Driver installation is really only a hassle for NVIDIA users. AMD and Intel GPUs simply work out of the box on most Linux distros these days (with the main issues being related to using slow moving distros that lack support for the newest hardware). Use a fast moving distro such as Arch and you likely won’t have any issues even with recent GPUs. Hopefully NVK will make the situation for NVIDIA cards better too, been testing it on my laptop and it’s starting to be viable for gaming.
It sucks ass. I actually returned my gaming desktop to W11 recently because I suck and my games just stopped launching. Never buying nvidia again, building a new desktop right now to get away from windows again.
Yeah, building a new PC without NVIDIA or at least swapping your GPU really is the best solution. The past two years I’ve run an Intel Arc A770 which was rough at first because the drivers were brand new but has been solid for over a year now and then in February or so I upgraded to an AMD Radeon RX 7800XT which has been absolutely amazing with my 4K 144Hz display. My setup before that was a 1080Ti and it was never an enjoyable experience on Linux and I usually gamed on Win10 on it. I haven’t really touched Windows other than a small handful of times on the A770 or 7800XT as Linux runs great on them.
How is the Intel card? I’m eyeing it heavily and debating on a hold out for the battlemage.
Pretty good for the price! I was using it woth a 144Hz 1440p monitor for at least a year and played mostly Overwatch and CSGO/CS2. It does pretty well and Mesa support/performance for it has gotten pretty good. I still use that build (the A770 paired with a Ryzen 9 3950X) for LAN parties and with my TV and it is a fine GPU. It wasn’t handling 4K 144Hz too well especially on more demanding titles which is why I ended up getting the 7800XT. I’m definitely excited for Battlemage cards.
Not the original poster, but my experience was fairly smooth. I had minor issues with wifi drivers, and I got a new GPU that had some driver issues because it was pretty recently released (I guess the open source drivers didn’t have time to be updated?). In terms of actual gaming, basically no issues. I mainly use steam and proton has been bliss, I’ve bought multiple games without even checking compatibility, and it just works. To my knowledge there is only one old game where the multiplayer doesn’t work, but everything else has been seamless. Mint cinnamon is what I’m currently running.
Base Ubuntu with the non snap version of steam has been great. I only play a few games, helldivers, some rouglites, and apex. The thing I miss with windows is HDR and auto HDR. HDR will be added in plasma 6 but I had issues with it on KDE Neon but once it’s on a stable build it will be good.
The main setup went smooth. I can recommend nobara which is what I used. I tried garuda as well, but it wasn’t my style. Personal preference, no hate :).
Most steam games work pretty good ( see protondb ). ( make sure to set your steam settings > compatibility to all games ).
Any game with invasive anti-cheat will likely not work. LoL and valorant come to mind. I think some of the cs2 ones like faceit won’t work on Linux. But standard cs2 and competitive work fine.
Battle.net gave me some issues on lutris until I forced it to proton.
Overall I’ve had a good experience. Sometimes a weird issue if I alt tab ( hots ) that it comes back super tiny. I worked around it by running it windowed fullscreen.
Overall I’ve no regrets so far. I installed nobara and it’s quite user friendly. I’ve never used a fedora distro before ( more extensive experience with xubuntu/Ubuntu/pop ).
Helldivers 2, heroes of the storm and ff crisis core worked flawlessly.
Hots needs to run full screen ( windowed ) or alt-tab will make the screen tiny for some reason.
So far: no regrets.
When you first play a game it needs to compile the shaders first. So on your initial game there’s a few minutes ramp up time. But any next times you start the game should be fine.
I tried Garuda as well, and was not happy with the hoops I had to go through. I switched to Pop OS, and have had very smooth sailing so far.
Thank you for mentioning hots, because that’s like the ONE steam game I couldn’t live without. Good to know it’s possible, even if I have to play true full screen vs windowed.
For hots: install lutris through the nobara app store. Start it and leave it for a few minutes while you run other updates or something ( only the very first time ).
Go to the settings/preferences, ( three dots top right ), click runners, scroll all the way down to wine.
Click the cog and change the runtime from wine-… to proton-GE. Thrn you can just install the battle.net app through lutris. From the battle.net app you can install hots.
Using the built in wine-… Runtime I got errors like missing Microsoft arial or unable to validate certificate.
with proton it just instantly worked.
You can also add the battle.net installer as an external steam app and run/install it that way. The only downside would be that you can’t play a steam game AND have bnet running ( which you can through lutris ).
Exiting battle.net doesn’t seem to be enough to stop lutris running it. So you might have to click the stop button in lutris if you want to restart it.
Battle.net is a bit wonky. But once you’ve got it IP and running it’s okay.
I have an older GPU (rx 470) and I play games that probably aren’t super new so my main concerns were mainly my tech literacy and fear of fucking something up xD
I want to just convert to using my Fedora 40 KDE install, but there are just too many blockers for me, both hardware and software.
