I detest this company for many reasons, it’s like they go out of their way to make dealing with them as painful as possible.
Here’s just one example I discovered today. I have a Windows 10 VM I needed to upgrade to 11 but the “PC Health Check” app says no, the i5 processor isn’t supported.
I can, however, create a new VM and install 11 on the exact same hardware, so that’s what I did, along with a whole bunch of extra work to get the new VM set up the same as the old Windows 10 VM was.
Why? Because fuck you, that’s why.
Assholes.
This is how i feel about 98% of Azure. Its just so needlessly complicated, with incomprehensible defaults, and out of date documentation, and APIs that just fail silently.
So much this. I actually pulled all of our servers from Azure and went back to a regular provider. Way cheaper as well.
There is a way to upgrade directly. I got this from Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/1afu0uj/is_it_safe_to_install_windows_11_on_my_microsoft/
It works fine - you just won’t get the more advanced security features available in more recent laptops.
- Boot up into Windows 10
- ensure you have 30GB free space
- Download the .iso: https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11
- right-click the .iso and select “mount” to create a virtual DVDROM
- create a new folder on your main system drive and copy all the files from the virtual DVDROM
- start a command-prompt
- navigate to the folder where you copied all the files
- run the following:
.\sources\setupprep.exe /product server
This will not actually install the server version of windows but will bypass the CPU check so that you can install Win11 on an unsupported CPU. The actual version of Windows installed will depend on the version of Win10 you have: Pro, Home, or Enterprise, for example.
Luckily i keep not running into the issues, Its mostly the unwanted windows features that seem to irritate me (f off onedrive and copilot) I keep trying to swap but I found what im good at finally and it is bricking linux installs.
And looking like they are impossible to solve. It seems that the OS is more and more a black box of vibe coding and marketing wank as time passes.
I ignore them from Linux land. :)
Frankly I’ve never had any issues running Windows 11. It’s just the OS in the background for me. I think the biggest difference is I always run Enterprise versions (not Pro or Home) and most of that crap is either non-existent, disabled by default or easy to disable via GPO.
The big thing for people to realize is that Enterprise is the version most all businesses (especially large ones) run, and Microsoft isn’t going to crap on them as easily. And they know by extension, people will run what their business is, but they can get away with making Pro and Home crappier since it’s just individuals who would switch, not large swaths.
Pro and Home is where they test-market the worst of the garbage… some of it does make it into Enterprise - a surprising amount has gotten into Office 365 - but, yeah, not enough to make it completely dysfunctional.
Lol its amazing how Noone in the real world knows that microsoft makes OS’s without all the enshitification shit in them that run decent, dont block features from being disabled, are all around non-infuriating piles of shit like the non-enterprise versions, charge an arm and a leg for it. Then microsoft (or at the same time didnt mean one before the other) releases the functionally identical OS versions but so facefucked full of enshitification shit they constantly break, these versions hold you down with an update pistol in your mouth that tells you inorder to live you will update every fucking shitstorm we tell you to, it rapes yo wife, rapes yo kids, ignores all bugs calling them features, all the while having a bomb strapped to their chest that says you dont accept everything we ruin of yours we blow your whole fucking system sky high. And those versions they call Home and Pro versions.
My company (130,000 employees) sticks to 24H2. IT wouldn’t approve the 25H2. Don’t know whether the refusal to upgrade hurts Microsoft in any way, but if it does, I think we’re big enough to be on their radar, and perhaps they talk to our IT about concerns and complaints we may have.
So Microsoft is so diversified, 130K isn’t even a drop to them. We had almost 200K seats of E3 and when I calculated out the revenue from our EA vs their total revenue, it came up to something like 0.012%. Even though it was tens of millions of dollars on our end, we’re still a drop in the bucket to them.
This is the issue I have with people talking about how “you MUST always run the most up to date software”. They don’t understand that in large enterprise it is common for function and security to not update unless there is a damn good reason. The very idea that the newest version is the best is just marketing brainwashing and does not hold up to the reality of use.
Thank you! Lemmy is a bunch of people bitching about their brand name laptop running a garbage version of Windows and loaded with factory crapware.
But hey, they get to come here and comment smugly about Linux. Meanwhile, I haven’t read a single article talking about an issue I’ve actually seen, at home or office.
Which is, by the way, totally ok. If you buy an expensive computer and it is getting shipped with a garbage version of an OS that is something to complain about. It’s also totally reasonable to complain that there is a garbage version at all. People shouldn’t need to reinstall their brand new computers with pirated enterprise versions to escape the abuses of Microsoft. At least let us bitch about this here, dude!
If retail laptops came with enterprise or the upgrade to enterprise was free or the home and pro versions had the same minimal crapware as enterprise then you might have a point.
But that isn’t the case and Linux is still free and not full of shit so the smugness is mostly justified and you’re mostly wrong.
I like how taskbar buttons dynamically resize depending on window title. I like that the size of the buttons on the taskbar are all different, and I like not having a way to change this back to the boring obvious tried-and-true standard of having buttons that are all the same size.
I like that the rules appear to not make any fucking sense, leading to situations where you can have 3 entries for the same program with the same content open that are all different sizes.
I like it because it takes me out of whatever I’m doing and forces me to notice the user interface. I like getting distracted by little hints of movement at the bottom of the screen that make me stop and go “wait what the fuck did it just do”.
I like that when I last searched for “windows 11 taskbar button resize disable”, the only mention of the word “disable” on the first page of search results was this:
I like having to put “site:reddit.com” at the end of my search query before I can even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
And I like having to ultimately give up and live with it because at the end of the day, it’s a feature and not a bug.
deleted by creator
I like having to put “site:reddit.com” at the end of my search query before I can even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
kagi.com solved this problem for me.
Why in the world do you have titles of the taskbar?!
Ungrouped buttons with titles is very efficient for me, too. I grew up with Windows 95 (that was the default behaviour back then) and my brain can handle this really well. I despise grouped buttons I have to hover over to see the actual windows and the icons only mode makes the clickable area too small and annoying to navigate to.
I grew up with that too, but the only time I’ve had any sort of slowdown from grouped icons is when I’ve been juggling like 4 excel sheets. I don’t often find myself with that many instances of the same program open often enough for it to matter.
It was an adjustment at first back in… Windows 7 I think, but I really haven’t missed it since.
Visibility and accessibility of windows, without the need to expand a group or neutral icon.
I am really wondering this too. Seems like people just love making the user experience harder for themselves because “that’s what I grew up with”.
Ha! It’s 2026 now. Those problems can easily be ignored as they are all in the past.
I love the smell of pedantry in the morning
One of the best feelings for me ever was when I cancelled my Micro$oft account after switching to Mint.
The freshness is real.
Some of the issues described in the article must be driving corporate IT departments insane. They thrive on consistent installations across machines. Having each one offering different features (even temporarily) is the opposite of that.
Any IT department worth their salt will have solved this problem years ago. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never managed Windows in an enterprise setting but there’s a reason that profit-hungry corporations all use Windows. Here’s the full process for getting any Windows laptop to work perfectly:
- unbox the laptop and turn it on
- insert the USB key with the provisioning package
- wait about two seconds for Windows to tell you to remove the USB key.
- go to lunch
If they have a channel supplier that offers ‘white glove’ service they don’t even need to do that and they can even have brand new laptops drop-shipped to a user at home without ever needing to touch it. And if that laptop fucks up down the line it can just be wiped and as soon as Windows connects to the Internet it can automatically re-enrol itself into the organisation’s management system.
With PXE boot you don’t even need a USB. Boot into the imaging “OS” over the network.
My workplace has a couple of dedicated network switches on a dedicated “imaging” VLAN in the hardware room, that way normal users can’t accidentally reimage their own machine. I think the desktop guys can get 32 going at once, and the complete automated setup time for one is like 40 minutes.
The group policy management has a lot of options. You can control automatic and manual behavior, or do the whole update delivery yourself. Of course, that all comes with effort and investment into administration and management.
Just imagine how many tutorials, documentations, videos and so on Microsoft has made obsolete by just moving the start menu from the lower left side to the middle. And yes, you totally can’t expect users to find the new position on their own, some people are interesting
This generation of software companies really seem to have abandoned all previous goals for “Let’s see how shit we can make this!”
“Sir, if we can finish our robot it could help with any household chores and even take over most of the care work for the elderly. Then in future patches we could make it waterboard the user unless they get the waterboardless premium subscription. Then we’ll increase the cost and slowly reintroduce waterboarding even for subscribers.”
You are now VP of product development at Microsoft. Congratulations.
P.S. Get a bullet proof vest and car.
Doesn’t stop a homemade drone and a fragmentation payload. Or for that matter, a rigged car or location.
This guy assassinates.
I can ignore them just fine since I am no longer using Windows.
I haven’t used Windows for more than 10 years and I’m happy too.
I think it’s worth repeating that Ubuntu has been available since 2005 (20 years now) and from the start it filled the needs of most users at home (i.e. watching crap on YouTube and using LibreOffice). Most users I have seen around me only have basic requirements and should have switched decades ago.
TL;DR: if you complain about your computer nowadays and don’t play games, install Ubuntu or Mint or anything else, I don’t care anymore.
There is only a subset of Windows games left that does not run on Linux. Mostly games with kernelbased Anti-Cheat and a few other outliers. I’ve been gaming exclusively on Linux for years now. Have a look at the ProtonDB website to see if your favourite games are running on Linux
Even playing games on Linux is much better now thanks to Steam. Never a better time to change. I want my next phone to have Ubuntu Touch as well. Fuck the horrible Google/Apple ecosystem.
This might interest you https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder
damn that looks great. I can’t wait to get a decent linux phone!
Since the rise of proton gaming is now absolutely viable on Linux as well. The exclusive use cases for Windows are disappearing fast.
Shoutout to the crew at Lutris for their gaming platform as well. I play Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online with it, and couldn’t be more pleased with the performance.
I’ve been playing games on [K]Ubuntu just for almost a decade now. There are no excuses, and haven’t been for a long time.
I’ve never used Windows - apart from new workplace requiring it. I largely not see it, unless corporate IT screws up.
Even corporate IT suffers. At my job, we have to apply updates pretty quickly. If Microsoft pushes a bad update, it’ll probably affect a lot of us. Or when they add a new feature like Copilot, they ship it without any administrative controls to turn it off.
I won’t deny it’s godawful to have shit split across AD, Group Policy, Regedit, and Azure/Entra/Intune.
But they very much still have controls for all this shit, almost always available before the feature rolls out. I’ve literally never seen this shit make it through to our end user devices in an un-intended fashion.
Hell, just hold non-security updates for a period of time for review before pushing it to your entire environment if this (not actually happening) issue is a concern. That’s like basic table stakes for Windows environment administration: update cadence management and pilot machines.
Please don’t claim to speak from a place of authority on this and then spread falsehoods. There’s plenty of shit to hate without making things up.
Like the third party app approvals in Azure and Teams defaulting to allow any non-admin user to be able to approve any azure app access to all of their data with no oversight. You can (and should) lock that the fuck down. It’s a batshit default, not a lack of controls.
they ship it without any administrative controls to turn it off.
I thought one of the saving grace of windows corporate was having finer control?
I don’t know what this guy is smoking. Copilot had administrative controls before it rolled out, through Intune and Group Policy.
The problem is Microsoft is trying to push the corporate environment away from on-prem infrastructure and into the cloud. There is less and less you can do from Active Directory and Group Policy, more and more of it gets moved to InTune everyday.
Microsoft is pushing Azure Arc as well, which is intended to let you manage your on-prem resources using your cloud management interfaces.
I can ignore it because I don’t have any of these issues. Haven’t read a single article in the last year or two that bitched about Windows problems I’ve seen IRL.
Why are the windows updates always so massive and resource intensive
AI.
I am writing this from Windows 11. I still haven’t solved my wacom tablet issues on Linux. I still have a drive with Nobara 42, but I can’t use it. When I have some free time, I will get to the bottom of it, and perhaps (finally) ditch the Windows. Addendum : right now I depend on Windows+Wacom to keep functioning correctly to be able to work.
i’m using KDA plasma six with fedora. My wacom intous works great. I can’t remember if I installed a driver or just used what was in the OS but either way it was pretty simple.
I have had feedback from another person on another forum saying they don’t have any issues either. Do you mind sharing your tablet model name, and any details you think might be relevant to this ? for instance mine is PTH-660, the one from 2024 that does touch as well (although I generally keep it off). Perhaps the distro details are important too, but tbf I’ve had the exact same issues with every distro I’ve tried : CachyOS, Nobara 42, Debian Trixie… it’s also only with Wayland, X11 works fine (but has other limitations regarding multimonitor that are problematic).
Yeah, wacom intous pro PTH – 660. I know it was purchased before the pandemic. I don’t remember the exact year. I’m using Wayland but without multiple monitors.
Did you try getting a driver from wacom?
No, I thought the entire driver was kernel level already with no need for tinkering. I will look this up, thanks for the suggestion
For me it is the displaylink dock driver which consume all the CPU in Ubuntu and Fedora. When that will sorted out, but I doubt it will happen anytime soon, I will finally ditch Windows.
I’m not sure what this is. DDG shows me things that look like port hubs ? but for displays ? I haven’t kept up with the times
Okay PCWorld helped me somewhat. https://www.pcworld.com/article/801587/best-displaylink-docks.html
I’m not sure what this brings compared to connecting your monitor directly to your laptop ?
If your laptop doesn’t have enough ports built in.
I have 2 computers connected to an USB switch (not a port replicator but one that let switch the host of your USB switch) and the dock attached to this USB switch. This allows me to quickly switch all of my desk devices (multiple monitors, webcam, microphone, gigabit network, etc…) with one click. Also both computer just require 2 cables for everything: USB and power cord. It took some time to put it all together but it is now my definitive battle station.
Unfortunately the dock does not work well with Linux and I am not able to find a non displaylink dock that enables me to achieve all of this. It is just a driver problem, but still…
I have been very successful at ignoring Windows for quite some time.
