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The amount of work required, post installation, to make Windows usable, is one of the things that pushed me towards Linux on the desktop.

I used to do a few of the regular tweaks decades ago to squeeze out the maximum frame rate of Quake, etc. but getting rid of the basic shit that I don't want modern Windows to be doing was a bigger job than tweaking old Windows for gaming. That, to me, indicates a severe bloat problem.

Went with windows 10 for a VM, less cow manure to deal with (still bloated and useless without debloating). After booting nearly all of the calls home got rejected anyway because they were marked as spyware related. I would imagine they got that close to 100% on windows 11.

Gaming on linux is fine, framerates and cpu usage are higher and less despite the wine/proton wrappers.

Windows 10 install still has like six traps in the setup wizard. If that’s the better option I shudder to think what 11 looks like. I call it adversarial computing where your OS is explicitly at cross purposes to what is best for you.
I leaped to Linux a few years back. One of the best moves in my life. The speed, the reaction time, the lack of bloat.

I side-car'ed a Mac for some apps that could not go through (e.g. for audio work, which Linux has some difficulties with, and lacks a lot of good apps for), but even that went smoothly because it had far less bloat and was already very UNIX-y.

Well, this is Microslop (https://microslop.com/) in action. The Microsoft 365 Team rely HEAVILY on AI to for coding and development including security fixes.

None of the AI fans on HN will admit that AI just produces buggy software. They are all in the clouds about not having to type or face any friction to produce their dream vision or pet projects in a jiffy.

Is there a checklist of things that would be better to uninstall or switch off?
Check out Chris titus tech's scripts
Great. Thanks. For those who could be interested as well: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
I built myself a new PC recently and jumped straight to installing Linux on it. Unfortunately the experience isn't quite as plug and play there either... In terms of everything I had to do:

- Disable iGPU in BIOS because on a cold boot the system would "latch on" to the iGPU (iGPU was GPU 0 and dGPU was GPU 1, which some programs I guess interpret as "GPU 0 == primary GPU"). Everything is fine on a warm reboot where it assigns dGPU to the 0 slot and iGPU to the 1 slot

- Get a special dongle to get 4k120Hz support over HDMI because the driver doesn't support it. The dongle should also enable VRR but needs multiple kernel patches to do that. Applying the patches causes varying levels of graphical glitches

- On waking from S3 the HDMI audio is dead. I tried various kernel arguments related to power management that various people had reported working for them but ultimately none of them ended up working for me so this one is still broken. Gave up on HDMI audio out and used an SPDIF cable instead (my AVR has been a magical problem solver here but most people aren't going to have a separate device to do that for them)

- On waking from S3 the wifi doesn't automatically reconnect. Solved with a systemd unit that just toggles it off and back on

- The audio out kept changing away from the one I set. As far as I can tell there's no easy way to set the "default" like you can in macOS or Windows, so I had to fudge the priorities of the built in devices a bit with a Wireplumber config

While debugging all the issues I've been bouncing back and forth between various kernel versions and patches. The fact that you can do that is awesome, but the fact that you have to do it to fix and debug issues is unfortunate. Just as an example, while debugging the audio problems I found a ticket that looked like it could be related on the amdgpu driver issue tracker where someone reported a similar problem, and the response from AMD was "please bisect the kernel"... That's just not something that most people are going to be willing or able to do. AMD GPUs are even supposed to be the well supported platform compared to Nvidia. I will say though, this whole debacle with the dongle sure had me wishing I could just stick an opaque-but-vendor-supported blob in like you do with Nvidia and get HDMI 2.1 working out of the box.

At least on Windows, IME Microsoft ironed out a lot of these types of driver issues in the Windows 7/10 era so that things like sleep just tended to work. It's been a while since you had to track down the right driver for your hardware manually. They just kept going downhill from that point forward with boneheaded decisions like sticking React Native or whatever in the start menu and forcing shovelware down people's throats. Even though I was having all these problems with Linux I personally won't go back to Windows, but I'll think twice about recommending it to my non-tech friends and family.

And then you get responses like this. It's like they can't be arsed to post about the article, they go on some completely different topic, i.e. gaming. At least make the anecdote no one really cares about related to this piss poor excuse of an article.

Like, seriously?

This may or may not be true, but that article is indistinguishable from a pretty low-effort Ai summary of three Reddit threads.
Referencing "multiple admins" and anonymous Reddit posters gives no credence to the value of this article.
What about company marketing slides? Do they give more credence?
I am hoping to see KDE adopting more enterprise friendly approach to things so I can start switching people over to linux. Now that they got funding for it maybe possible in a year or two?

So far only Ubuntu with Gnome is friendly with entra

It's mind boggling how bad Microsoft have made this.

I just want to install a few apps and manage their settings. But the combination of Windows, Intune, modern Store apps, multiple similar settings, and licensing, make it a full time job full of footguns.

If they just had one team with responsibility for end user experience they could bring this tech together in amazing ways.

But instead there's probably at least one FTE is every IT department in the world just managing Microsoft's bullshit

I have always hated working wherever they use Windows. The management at such places doesn't mind if the workers suffocate. It is a filter for where not to work, although not the only one.
The sites breaks scrolling on the iPad. Their engineers are probably busy fixing Windows issues.
I use Arch btw
Good point. If I were facing the problems they have, I'd surely would change the distribution.
Why is an article that consists of a reddit user as a source being upvoted on HN?

Stop posting such drivel. Do better than make HN into reddit. You can find people to complain on any topic. That doesn’t make it interesting enough to post here.

Right, I came here wondering if others saw the same. What is this doing on hn!??
Aww so sad! Too bad they are locked into the ecosystem and Microsoft isn’t listening.
There must be a term for entrapping people in their ecosystem and then delivering a shittier and shittier product... Doing an Adobe?

Something like Toxic Partner Syndrome, or "John Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane behavior".

Anybody in business who uses the word "partner" in its current sense plots at heart to add the "toxic".
IT admins don't make technology decisions. They're there to do work, no think.
The good ones probably can't help but do some amount of thinking.

I'd probably consider thata good thing, almost to the extent that I would hire a thinker over the alternative.

We do push back on bad decisions and decide on new technologies so we do have a say in this (unless shadow IT works around us).