This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's good that these tools exist, but it's so frustrating that it's a constant cat and mouse game of Microsoft trying to make their products as cumbersome and shit as possible and the community trying to salvage Windows to the best of their ability.
At what point do OEMs just say actually nah, I'm tired of you making our laptops frustrating to use?
At what point do they say fuck it I'm going the Valve route and moving away from a company that wants to undermine my products and my brand?
uhh they will include copilot key in keyboard in new laptops...
Very useful, just like my dedicated Cortana key. 🤡
The people who use tools like this are in the minority. The majority (probably the vast majority) of people use Windows as it is out of the box.
The number for people I have seen with search box still enabled in taskbar tells me that's true.
Everyone. Everywhere.
It blows my mind, but then I realise that we here on Lemmy are the 1% of IT users.
Yes, I know.
But it's not like these people actually love ads all over the place, or bing results in start menus, or popups asking them to pwetty pwease use OneDrive, or can you pwetty pwetty pwease use Edge instead of Chrome, they just either:
don't know they can get rid of that stuff
don't trust tools and are afraid they'll break something or the tools will contain a virus
don't care enough to research this crap
view using their PC as a chore anyway, and so power through the annoyances
I don't own a Mac, and don't intend to, but of the biggest things people like about them is that there are far fewer of these types of annoyances.
It's not just extreme power users that can be irked by all this crap - they're just the ones who do things about it and chat on forums about it. A normal person just sighs and thinks ugh I'd rather just do this on my phone
it's a constant cat and mouse game
It's not just Microsoft. Never heard of always on DRM? Or government making it difficult for people to receive assistance (disability or homeless)?
For me it is so weird, that you have to use extra tools to disable telemetry and unwanted features in windows systems. Why is windows not giving me a central option to decide on those things? Is it maybe because they do not want me to decide for myself and therefore splitting the places where I need to disable all that unwanted stuff as opaque as possible? Can they be more obvious that they do not value your opinion on how you want your OS to behave?
Quit Windows. It is a dead end and get worst with every release.
If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.
want your OS
That's the problem, it's not your OS.
It's a shame. I really love Windows 10. It's fast and the UI's ergonomy is near perfect.
On my work laptop we recently had to switch to Windows 11 and it's a fucking pain to use. You have to jump through so many hoops and do extra clicks to do what you want. And the start menu has become completely useless. And I hate the gaps and rounded corners everywhere. And that's just on the surface. Performance is piss poor and you have all that crap spying on you to collect your usage data.
The day Windows 10 becomes unsupported is the day I go 100% Linux.
Forced to use it at work, too, and only by the grace of being in the IT department do I have the ability to make it less shitty.
There's registry entries to restore the full context menu, and PowerToys Run has effectively become my defacto start menu, though obviously you need to use the keyboard so it's not a perfect UI replacement. Meanwhile for searching, I've got Everything running and set global keyboard shortcuts/touchpad gestures to it. Maybe I'll grab an old gaming mouse and shortcut them to the extra buttons.
They finally implemented never combine on the taskbar, and it's...tolerable, but buggy and still resizes things for no reason
Unfortunately I've yet to find a way to get some damn 90° angles back. I can not wait for a few years down the line when we finally swing away from this Apple-chasing "bubbles with an inch between them on a white/black field" design aesthetic. I'm tired of everything looking like a toy, especially at the cost of its actual utility.
And not just a toy, the same toy. It's seriously Corporate Memphis levels of lifeless, forced design with no character, creativity, or ingenuity.
This has been exactly my stance as well apart from ever having used Win11. Never did and never plan to, downloaded Mint a few months ago to start getting familiar with it. Turns out I'm not real great at technical stuff but I'm getting there. Dual monitors was kind of a booger and now I'm trying to figure out how to install some games since Bottles is being a real wiener about Battle.Net. I'm glad there's so many resources and forums out there but I still hope some version of Linux gets dumbed down a little more before Win10 sunsets to make the transition easier for us blue collar folk
If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.
Trust me, I'm not installing Windows as the Operating System for my Children's brains.
I switched to linux yeats ago but i now need to build myself a windows 11 base image thats as lightweight as possible for my vms and im dreading that immeansly. I just want onw toll that can kill literally everything thats unessasary. I mean unless proton and wine has gotten good enough to run autocad programs.
Use Windows LTSC, it doesn't have this stuff. Then permanently license it with the MAS tool on github (let me go find a link)
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
Courtesy of subtext
This is absolutely the way. My wife needed windows for school recently... Ltsc was the only way to go.
I use windows 11 for work and it's absolutely horrible.. took them a year to let us ungroup windows on the task bar. Win11 literally didn't ship with that ability.
I removed it by installing Linux
Annnnnnnnnnnd there it is!
Like clockwork! Almost as reliable as the OS /s
Linux has no mainstream advertising so word-of-mouth is the only way it gets adopted.
Can you imagine installing Windows and having to install 10 seperate programs just to fix all the issues with it?
Every day with Windows is like this. It’s a fucking nightmare. I don’t know what else to do.
Truly the Bethesda of operating systems.
install random third party software that may be sniffing or leaking information to remove shady features from windows that sniff and leak information.
windows sucks.
The app is open source so you can review the not-leaking-your-information that it does yourself.
Windows on the other hand ...
I used to have a power shell script that a coworker gave me that would uninstall a huge number of services and apps on windows, change a bunch of config settings etc.
I've always wished there were a way to roll out a stripped windows release as an open source project without getting sued.
Although im part of the Linux crowd, if you’re tired of reapplying debloat scripts every update, you could get the W10 IoT LTSC edition that only has security patches with no updates. You will have to pirate it though.
I've no idea what MS are even doing with all this shit.
I'm like 95% sure I had an AI icon in the search bar yesterday, and today it's a briefcase. 🤷
I guess for some reason it decided to pack up
I'm tired of playing the debloat game, especially with the frequency of Windows updates that undo and add things.
Problem I've had with all these "fixes" the issues come back or the OS craps the bed
As someone who uses windows to produce music, bloat is a huge issue, latencymon Is a great tool to check for programs and drivers that can cause audio dropouts.
And win 11 has been great, didn't have to change much to get it to work. I tried several forms of Linux and it was too slow, driver issues, and plugins that were impossible to get working.
Win 10 was bad, but 7 was worse.
It really is a shame that music production is so painful in Linux. All I need to make the final switch
I literally have a windows 10 installed that I haven't logged in since before AI came up. WTF! I can only imagine the massive update when I try to login next time.
The option to install Opera should be removed.
I use AtlasOS to debloat and optimize (disabling animations, annoying requests and so on) Windows 10/11
