If you’re using Windows 11 and not having a great time with it, there are ways to make the experience more pleasant. We’ve covered 14 tweaks to make Windows 11 better and how to remove Windows 11’s junk, which is a good start toward making an OS you enjoy.
There’s another way…
You could install a windows 10 system to replace the windows 11 system!
Step one. Install Linux Mint.
Imagine having to remove a bunch of shit just so you can use your OS. smh
Luckily, there exists an OS which undermines extreme enshittification. Can’t remember the name, though …
I have deciphered your message, and the answer is clear.
BSD?
Can’t remember the name, though
It goes by many names…
But you may call it Tim
It is enchanting…
Haiku?
Plan9?TempleOS
BeOS?
TempleOs
Sadly, your hardware must support Spirit Boot to install this OS.
So Microsoft wants to force everyone to ditch their perfectly good machines so they can make more money off of selling OEM licenses.
I’m just waiting for Europe to sue their greedy asses for planned obsolescence.
I can’t tell you how many Apple devices I’ve had that have become unsupported over the years.
Like what? I’m still using my 2011 MacBook Pro, and my phone is about six years old.
I can’t update my 2011 MBP to the latest version of OSX, but it still works fantastically for everyday stuff. Phone can update to the next version of iOS.
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It’s THIRTEEN YEARS OLD! It still functions! If it stops functioning, I can put Linux on it!
It’s a first-gen Core i7… I don’t think the hardware would support the latest version that well, if at al.
It’s THIRTEEN YEARS OLD!
Thirteen year old Windows computers still get updates (not to mention Linux).
It still functions!
Really? You don’t have any apps that refuse to run because the OS version is too old? My 10 year old iMac won’t run hardly anything…not even a browser.
Mind you, not because the hardware is broken or unsupported, or the software is supported, but because Apple simply refuses to allow it.
not even a browser
Try Firefox maybe? Safari and Firefox work perfectly on my 13 year old MacBook… I don’t know what’s wrong with your machine.
Edit: you can’t put Windows 11 on a 13 year old machine, that’s a straight-up lie. Mind you, not because the hardware is broken or unsupported, but because Microsoft simply refuses to allow it.
you can’t put Windows 11 on a 13 year old machine
I didn’t say Windows 11. I said Windows. An up-to-date version of Windows. Nice try, though.
Yeah as much as this sucks I honestly hope that Microsoft will actually take advantage of this and start moving legacy support into more specialized options.
A lot of the reason windows is so janky at times is because of the insane obsession they have with backwards compatibility.
Lol, worst take I have ever heard.
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Windows has no purpose these days outside backwards compatibility.
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Windows primarily sucks because of ads and forced updates, not jank.
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Microsoft exclusively deals in antiquated spaghetti code, removing backwards compatibility won’t change that.
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Microsoft has no interest in improving users experience they have invested entirely in squeezing in micro transactions not exactly a user first design philosophy.
Enshittification
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False.
I work for Microsoft and I can assure you that any effort I make to increase code quality or reduce jank (or pretty much anything other than shoving more AI in our products) will not positively impact my bonus next year.
Are you working on Windows or another product? Also do you know why MS expects ROI for new Windows features ie. Amazon Appstore? Since Windows is a paid product (at least for OEMs) I would expect license income to sustain feature development.
What if you found another window to put ads in?
While I do agree that a lot of the PCs that are deemed not compatible is really stupid, there are people that are trying to use Windows 11 on devices that have no business running it, so this is partially to prevent their devices from getting infected with a virus or something
Why won’t they get a virus or something on Windows 10 with that same hardware?
Since when is having vulnerable hardware the business of the operating system? Sure, they’re allowed to do whatever they want, but it’s stupid. It’s your system. You should be able to try to run any software you want on it and the software shouldn’t care (unless it just literally can’t work, not a software check to make it not work).
I’m on Linux only though, so I may be biased. I think I own my computer and you may not agree with that.
I’ve lost count of how many times Microsoft, and many other big tech companies, hindered me from doing something I wanted to do on a device that I own for “security” reasons while it had absolutely nothing to do with security and everything to do with forcing their users to comply with their business model.
DRM chips have nothing to do with device security and everything to do with further controlling what you can and cannot do on your machine and making more money off of you.
You really shouldn’t believe the Corporate bad faith arguments used to justify anti-consumer practices.
My job has radicalized me against windows, the settings are factory reset quite frequently due to updates or reimaging so I’m constantly resetting every single option just to get it back to a continent state (Who in their right mind thinks centered task bar icons is a good thing!?!?!)
Malware such as that imbedded in Windows 11?
At the very least, they should be releasing some “Lite” version for older hardware or something.
It’s such a catch-22 with Linux, because you’re not going to see ads for it and most “normal” people don’t even know what it is (and that they have a viable alternative to Windows).
I don’t want ads for Linux, but I wish there was a way to elevate it into the general public consciousness so people are aware that they even have an option. AND ITS FREE.
Thank god, for a second there I thought they meant “cracking down on people dodging Windows 11 by intentionally disabling TPM,” like I’ve been doing. False alarm, carry on.
That is half the reason I have it disabled on my desktop. The other half being that the BIOS updates never fixed the fTPM stuttering issues for my computer (both using the 3700X and 5800X) so the computer is unusable with it turned on.
I mean, this was 100% predictable.
And anyone who didnt think it would happen were willfully blind or just plain ignorant.
You mean? Or you say?
Welcome to English Idioms 101
it has nothing to do with it. Welcome to the real English
This is just Vista all over again. Calm down people. Go to Linux or church if you’re scared.
The difference is, that you could just continue using XP until Win7 was released or continue using Win7 until Win10 was released. Win10 will reach end of life next year and then the only supported Windows will be Windows 11. Vista or Win8 were never as forced as Win11 is now.
I used XP until Windows 8 was released. At least I got a cheap Windows 8 key from Microsoft back then. And upgraded to 8.1 and later to 10. So I got my money’s worth out of it.
Such a shame things will never be as good as they were again.
The timeline for the lifecycle is 10 years. That’s ample time for an OS generation.
not really because Vista does not have strong hardware requirements. But, this one have
Today, sure.
2005 was a different story, one the opposite of this one.
While Vista didn’t have high specified requirements, it gobbled resources so updating from XP to Vista you’d have a noticable slowdown.
Win11 is the opposite of that story. While modern PC models (as in 5-year-old when Win11 first came out) can run Win11 fine, Microsoft forces requirements which aren’t needed.
Sure, while having a better TPM and newer processor is a good thing, making anything other than that ewaste (because windows runs 90+% of consumer PCs, with Apple being the majority of the 10%) definitely isn’t.
Vista was absolutely the slowest thing imaginable. They reduced the requirements as part of a marketing campaign for “Vista-ready” PCs, but PCs that ran it “well” were few and far between. Even after 7 came out if you went back to Vista it was noticeably slower.
I decided to look up what that term meant.
The minimum specs seem to be an 800Mhz system with 512MB memory. No, Vista will not run good on that. Even Windows 7 will not like it. Windows XP with SP3 will run on that, but even that will feel sluggish on 800Mhz.
That’s like early XP computers being released with 64 or 128 Megs of RAM. That may be the minimum specs but it’s not gonna be usable.
If you must use Windows, download it legitimately from MS website. Use RUFUS to burn the ISO image to a USB. Remove the restrictions you hate.
Dual boot a Linux variant, and move over apps at your leisure, until you are no longer Win OS dependent.
I just moved to Linux and started fresh.
The big mental change was instead of searching “sony vegas on linux please” I just started searching for “video editing software Linux”, and take any possible limitations and live with them, as I know it’s only temporary until Linux catches on.
What exactly do you mean, Linux had been "catching on’ since decades, you may need to wait for a while…
I mean for the big software boys to actually start caring about it.
I preferred to do Windows as a VM personally. Dual boot cost me a year before my Linux switch BC it was easier to boot Windows when I needed it. With VM I could do mostly Linux with maybe just vm to open a word doc if I needed it.
Why though? This just means that Windows 11 will run on more devices? Why is so important for your device to have a TPM and Secure Boot enabled, and a supported processor? If I were Microsoft, I would put the requirements even lower or even removed them.
This is just my theory, but maybe they want to turn it all into android-levels of lockdown for even stricter DRM and such.
M$ want to become even more unpopular with private users.
Many people don’t care about privacy
I think they meant private as in private person, not privacy
Well, they won’t be able to sell as many new computers if they let people keep using their old ones.
Microsoft still makes money off the OEM licenses AFAIK. The Linux community had a whole day about this back in the 90s.
They aren’t big in selling hardware.
Doesn’t matter, they still get money for Windows licences from OEMs.
I know, just clarifying that their main business isn’t selling hardware.
But that’s irrelevant. It’s still in their interest to get you to buy new PCs.
The comment was about selling new computers and not using old ones. They want to sell more software, they aren’t hardware focused.
And that comment was 100% correct. They want more computers sold, because more computers sold means more Windows licences sold.
You’re acting like PC hardware sales are unrelated to Windows license sales. They’re directly related.
Here’s the quote:
they won’t be able to sell as many new computers
Their sales of hardware are insignificant.
Except for laptops.
Even then (and with their Surface tablets) they’re not big for MS.
Somewhat ironically the Surface laptops are really great Linux machines.
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I just installed Linux Mint on a 15-year-old desktop that has never been upgraded and was middle-of-the-road when I got it. It shipped with Windows 7, and I tried a couple of times to upgrade to 10 (it failed every time, either losing core hardware functionality, running so slowly as to be unusable, or just refusing to boot altogether). But it runs Linux like a dream. Seriously—it’s easily running the latest version of Mint better than it ran an 11-year-old service pack of Windows 7.
What’s even crazier is that I installed VirtualBox on it, and put Windows 10 on that, to use some work programs. And that runs Windows 10 a bit slowly, but otherwise more or less flawlessly!
That’s right: I’m having a better Windows experience in Linux than I’ve ever had on baremetal Windows on this box.
I can’t believe I didn’t do this…well, 15 years ago.
I can’t believe I didn’t do this…well, 15 years ago.
For what it’s worth, your experience 15 years ago likely would have been very different. It’s only in the past few years that things like drivers for basic hardware have become widely available on Linux without a bunch of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. And even today, there are still certain drivers that often don’t like to play nice.
Ask anyone who had an nvidia GPU 15 years ago if they’d suggest switching to Linux. The answer would have been a resounding “fuck no, it won’t work with your GPU.”
That’s a good point. I didn’t think about that.
Eh, “a few years” here is selling Linux a bit short. I switched about 15 years ago, and while driver issues were a thing, it was still a pretty solid experience. I had to fiddle with my sound card and I replaced my wifi card in my laptop, but other than that, everything else worked perfectly. That still occasionally happens today, but as of about 10 years ago, I honestly haven’t heard of many problems (esp. w/ sound, that seems largely solved, at least within a few months of HW release).
I don’t know what you’re talking about WRT GPUs. Bumblebee (graphics switch) was absolutely a thing back in the day for Nvidia GPUs on laptops, which kinda sucked but did work, and today there are better options. On desktops, I ran Nvidia because ATI’s drivers were more annoying at the time. Ubuntu would detect your hardware and ask you to install proprietary drivers for whichever card you had. I ended up getting a laptop w/o a dGPU, mostly because I didn’t want to deal with graphics switching, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t work, it was just a pain. For dedicated systems though, it was pretty simple, I was able to play Minecraft on the GPU that came with my motherboard (ATI?), and it ran the beta Minecraft build just fine, along with some other simple games.
In short, if you were on a desktop, pretty much everything would work just fine. If you were on a laptop, most things would work just fine, and the better your hardware, the fewer problems you’d have (i.e. my ThinkPad worked just fine ~10 years ago).
Playing games could be a bit more tricky, but for just using the machine, pretty much any hardware would work out of the box, even 15 years ago. It has only gotten better since then.
I only use Windows 11 because it came preinstalled on the latest laptop I bought. Otherwise I have been a Linux user for over 15 years and will switch back sooner or later. Microsoft is making their products the immoral choice and I do recommend boycotting them.
I installed Linux mint on my laptop the other day because of various sustained long term annoyances with Windows. Despite some minor hiccups it only took about 30 minutes. It’s been such a great experience so far.
I’ve been on EndeavourOS (basically Arch… btw…) for about a year and a half now, and I absolutely love it. I will never use Windows by choice again.
I did the same. Windows 11 ads and one drive forced me out.
Did the same on my desktop computer two weeks ago, everything else is already on Linux (servers and laptops).
I am fed up on Microsoft shenanigans with windows.
More people will be redirect to Linux, cool.
Sorry for disappoint you. But, normies don’t know what is Linux about? hell even higher than average tech-savvy people know little bit Ubuntu as a Linux.
I’m a sysadmin. We’re a Linux shop, I spend my life deep in the guts of Linux boxes, both server and desktop.
And for my daily-driver both at work and at home, I use windows.
The UI and overall UX are just better. The annoying bullshit I make a living knowing my way around, I don’t have to think about.
For actual development or backend services, of course you want a Linux box. Proper logging, proper tools, build shit, pipe it together, automate stuff and get down and technical when it breaks. Doing that on windows is absolutely hell.
But on windows, the volume control just works, I never have to delete lockfiles to get my browser to open, my desktop login doesn’t terminate if something in .profile returned nonzero, I can play every video game out there without having to fuck around, I can use native versions of real apps, I don’t have package-management dependency hell, all the pieces were designed to work with each other, and the baseline cognitive load needed to just use my computer is zero, which frees up my brain to focus on my actual work, or for playing games and fucking around on the internets.
For UI/UX, you get to choose your DE if you want. Find something you like. KDE is very Windows-like, but with the ability to customize it if there’s things you don’t like.
As for the rest of your issues, literally I have never had an issue with them. Gaming is also perfectly fine without fucking around now, with very few exceptions (like Valorant that wants a rootkit). Also, no all the pieces on Windows weren’t designed to work together. For example, each individual app has to check for its own updates when it runs, which is the worst time to update, and you have to go to a website to download an updater. A package manager just a handles it all for you, because they’re designed to work together unlike Windows.
I don’t know about your actual competency with Linux/computers-in-general. I don’t want to make assumptions, but you really don’t seem to know what you’re doing. If Windows has less cognitive load, then you’re doing something wrong. You should experiment with other options and find what works for you.
I do know about window managers, thanks.
And that’s part of the problem: they all have their own slightly different infrastructure that relies on slightly intricate and not-quite-standard plumbing.
Dialogs not opening, or those weird invisible 30-second timeouts opening an application becasue dbus isn’t happy because one of the xorg init scripts messed some XDG path or set the wrong GTK_* option, or XAUTHORITY is pointing somewhere weird.
Whichever user is logged in locally should be allowed to talk to the device they plugged in via usb? Well that’s just an unreasonable thing to expect to happen by default, let me spend 20 minutes cooking up a udev script to chown it on creation.
Users managing to set their default terminal to some random script they were working on (seriously, how?). Or they initialised their xfce4 profile with the blank-toolbar option and now can’t work out how to launch anything.
Notification popups? Sure, the toolbar will let you add one, but nothing communicates with it by default lol.
also jesus christ kde.
And I’m talking about the built-in functionality of the desktop environment wrt package management, not separate applications.
Sure, it’s nice to be able to apt-get upgrade and just get everything all at once - when everything is happy with everything else.
But when you get conflicting dependencies and you have to take time out to track down what libpyzongo0-util is used for or what is going to break later on if you just purge it because people use cutesy package names that are worse than Ruby libraries in terms of communicating what they’re actually for, and do we need this thing for the core platform or it it form some random crap that was installed ad-hoc and used precisely once, it gets old.
Like I say you need this amount of flexibility and complexity for development and deployment and network services and all the rest. Anyone using Windows for much more than file-print-office-browser-gaming has more masochism in them than I can comprehend.
But for that same very minimal set of core use-cases, you don’t need (or, I’d argue, want) flexibility or complexity, you want it to be simple and robust with JOWTDI. And for everything else, you ssh into your linux box and do it there. I was amazed to discover that Windows Terminal is actually really nice; combine that with an X server and maybe a VNC client, and you’ve got the best of both worlds.
And yes, Windows has all kinds of annoying shit of its own - but that mostly pops up when you want to do interesting things on it, not when you just want to look at cat videos on the internet.
I personally find the my cognitive load with Linux is much lower now that I’ve switched over.
First of all, the Windows 11 UI is awful and ugly. The Windows 10 UI was never that great and only looks good as it ended up sandwiched between 8 and 11. I’d have to go to Windows 7 for something that’s decent. Admittedly the polish on a lot of Linux DEs and applications can leave a lot to be desired, but I have a choice between multiple DEs and many of those DEs are highly customizable. I’d have to go back to Windows 7 for something that’s better polished and works as good for me as XFCE does.
Then there’s being in control of my own computer. I control when it does its updates. My computer respects my settings and preferences and doesn’t randomly change or reset them. It doesn’t randomly install unwanted software on it’s own, or reinstall stuff I explicitly removed. It doesn’t place ads in my whisker menu or on my desktop or lock screen. There’s no telemetry being sent home to the mothership. With anything past Windows 8 I’ve never really felt like I’m in complete control and Microsoft can just do whatever the hell they want.
While there are the occasional issues as someone who is familiar with Linux it’s typically not too difficult to track it down and fix it. Though there are exceptions of course. At least if I have to edit some files in /etc they tend to stay that way as opposed to having to edit the registry with regedit.exe only to have Windows randomly undo what I did with the next update. And while PulseAudio is notorious for causing all sorts of havoc, it seems like it’s finally gotten to the point where it finally works and I haven’t had any issues with the volume control for a while now.
As for games it obviously matters what games you like to play, but the amount of tinkering I’ve had to do to play any game in my Stream library beyond enabling Proton so far is zero. Which has been a very pleasant surprise and honestly I’ve been pretty impressed with that.
Are you using debian woody or something? That list of issues is so weird.
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Preach! If this guy was my sysadmin at work, I’d fire him.
A censor happy mod thinks they are the greatest… How pathetic :D
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That would be me.
Tried Ubuntu 15 years ago, but couldn’t because Nvidia driver issues, and haven’t tried again
Look, dudes, I’m bootstrapping a small business while trying to manage ADHD. I can barely get two hours of admin work done in an eight hour day. I just need things to work. I’d love to walk away from Windows but I don’t have the mental bandwidth for that shit
And even if I did, my wife and I share a gaming computer/media center. There’s nothing like having her call me in the middle of a workday because my VPN is keeping her from logging into PBS so that she can watch Grantchester. Imagine the headaches if I installed a new OS.
Much like improving my physical fitness, I have the desire, but not the will
I just setup an old friend couple new computer with Windows. We lost a full day as the HP printer didn’t work (yet worked via Android and my linux laptop without installing absolutely anything), Outlook doesn’t save passwords (so we moved to Thunderbird), chrome is a mess (so we moved to Firefox + unlock origin), Microsoft excel is incredibly expensive and refused to open the only spreadsheet they needed (so me moved to libreoffice)…
A fucking nightmare. And everything worked fine with FOSS or on my laptop.
Just stay away from nvidia on Linux and you are golden.
Most distros work fine with Nvidia these days. The ones that don’t are more the exception.
Just stay away from nvidia on Linux and you are golden.
I’m sorry but this is the kind of condescending bullshit that pushes me away from Linux
I got a 3070TI for half off MSRP for open box in the middle of the crypto bubble, and I’m not buying another GPU until I absolutely have to.
You want more people to embrace Linux? Make it work on startup without jumping through a bunch of hoops, on the hardware we already own.
Your lived experience with Windows is yours, and I’m glad you have a system that works for you. I don’t have the time or mental energy to learn, not just a new OS, but also all of the bugs that go with it.
Look, I get it. I’m putting my apprentice in my old work van, and as I’m looking at the old heap I’m remembering all the little quirks it has that I’ve developed blind spots for. Blind spots they don’t have. Quirks that are actually problems. I know there are problems with windows that I ignore because I know how to work around them. I know the workarounds because I’ve been using Windows since 3.11. I didn’t have that experience with Linux, and neither does my wife. A woman who once nearly bricked our computer falling for an Indian call center scam.
When this rig bites the dust, I’ll probably build a Linux gaming box and just tell her to get used to the OS. For now, we’re using Windows
Also HP is shit and I’d gladly put any HP exec in the hospital if I met them
I honestly never had any problems with my nvidia cards on my Linux systems, and these are my daily drivers. I have 1 laptop that only has Windows and the other 6 computers here don’t. 3 of them are equipped with Nvidia GPUs and work without a single thing ever going wrong with them in that regard.
People who keep perpetuating these ideas that Nvidia = trouble don’t seem to understand that it’s scaring people from trying it out.
I’m AMD, but I heard Nvidia is much better now, and open source drivers are coming soon I believe. That should make the GPU excuse another dead one, along with the gaming one. There’s not going to be many good excuses left.
Just gotta spread the word. I got two people to switch from Windows to Linux recently. When they heard about an alternative they got very interested and jumped on the opportunity. People want an alternative, but like you say they don’t know one exists, so we need to keep spreading the word of Linux.
PS. They both are enjoying the ad free experience and don’t have any big issues or problems with Linux. Just learning pains
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Does it take longer? It almost always just works for me. I tell my package manager to install the package I want and then it’s taken care of, and updates are automatically managed. There’s no hunting around different websites for the installer and then going to the website to update every time the application launcher detects an update when it runs, which is the opposite of when I want to update it.
I don’t know what issues you’re facing, so I can’t comment on it directly. I’ve installed three different distributions withing the past 1.5 years, all which use different package mangers. Each one was faster than settings things up in Windows. The difference is my Windows install I installed a ton of things over time, most of which I wanted immediately when swapping. I don’t know how long it took in total for Windows, but I promise it was significantly longer.
Also the distro I’m using now, Garuda, has a tool to install a bunch of common applications that runs at start. You just tick the ones you want and it handles the rest. A lot of distros have something similar, which is really fast.
“How dare people install our OS without a DRM clipper chip”
“My OS is so secure!” Actually features of the hardware.
Article isn’t that great. The change is in beta, and it’s preventing the installer from accepting a switch that declares the OS to be a server product.
MS hasn’t said it’s going after any upgrades that are running out of spec hardware. This really sounds like they are just fixing an upgrade option.
