As someone with a sizeable background in Linux system engineering.. I prefer Windows to MacOS.
It's IMHO a better desktop now with the edge snap tile layout and etc. Excellent device compatibility. And I get my linux environment needs satisfied via WSL2 these days.
But damn if they don't get in their own way. I have my own Pro licenses, and even with Pro turning off ads and features is text book whack-a-mole:
* Frequent "Let's finish setting up your PC" after updates
* Killing OneDrive is a like night of the living dead
* Edge popping up "ads" asking you if you want to pin apps when it closes(a lot of windows apps wrap edge, like streaming apps, and show this too on close!)
* Scary Power Automate crap getting injected on updates(haven't seen this in a while)
* Internet search results in the "Home" search
* Random popups and product recommendations
* Registry disabled "features" randomly resurrecting after Windows update
Holy. Hell.
Edit: I recall now; Windows was installing a power automate extension into Chrome during Windows Update un-prompted last year. Caused a minor panic.
This might be obvious, but all of those things have a single common denominator: Microsoft, over you, getting to decide what your computer is doing. This is the biggest generalized danger in computing today: That OS (and device) manufacturers have gotten it in their heads that it's OK for them to have a strong say in what your computer runs. User doesn't want X, Y, or Z running on his computer? TOUGH. We are going to run it and make it really hard or impossible for user to turn it off. As a user, I no longer feel like I'm driving the car--I'm just a passenger. "Where do you want to go today?" has turned into "You're going here today, whether you want to or not!"
All true, and yet: Windows accessibility actually works. I use a screen reader daily. Linux a11y is complete dogshit — AT-SPI2 is unreliable, Orca is barely maintained, Wayland broke what little existed.
I need something that actually works. When Linux goes off and decides it'll rewrite its working desktop stack and it's still, ten years later, not useable?
ADHD-Driven development might be fine if you can see your system. When you can't, being at the whims of some teenager chasing the new shiny is just frustrating.
> This might be obvious, but all of those things have a single common denominator: Microsoft, over you, getting to decide what your computer is doing.
Sure, but Microsoft have to strike a balance, too. If they push too hard in this direction, they'll lose their users to Macs on one side (probably the majority) and Linux on the other (a minority in number, but perhaps significant in expertise and clout). Once an exodus begins, it's much harder to stop. So where we are in that balance, and the state of user mindshare migration, is still interesting to discuss.
It's more: you want to go to location A? Sure, but we're going to make a quick stop at locations B, C and D first, and the only available car is a known-to-be-dangerous self-driving robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals.
... which in the middle of the route decides to instead drive onto a container ship and bring you to a robotic island?
ah no wait, that's the announced next update.
I've had good luck with the winutil tool, which is wrapper for a bunch of powershell commands and registry edits in a .ps1 to remove bloat. After using it on a fresh install I can't recall the last time I've had any of the mentioned issues.
If you're (understandably) concerned about the security implications most of the changes can be done manually going off the docs.
https://github.com/christitustech/winutil
Bloat will come back on every update. It's futile.
I’ve used this Powershell script on every Windows 11 machine in the last four years (5+ devices) and have never needed to re-run it after an update.
It’s the first thing I do on a fresh install, and with my selections I see fewer ads (0, more or less) than I do on my MacBook for iCloud products so I’d hardly say it’s “futile” in actual use and only takes like 5 minutes to run once.
I always hear people say nothing sticks after an update but have literally only encountered that with Microsoft Edge and the default search engine. Not any of the Windows features disabled or configured by the script.
Not sure if it’s just outdated or a meme being repeated by non-Windows users but in any case it is not at all what I’ve experienced exclusively running debloated Windows 11 installs for years.
https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat
I'm not sure if I'm lucky or it's because I have feature releases deferred or if the tool ripped enough things out but this hasn't been my experience so far. If it does you could save off the changes as a JSON template and re-apply after updates, or automatically with task scheduler.
Use LTSC and you get 10 year support period, so you can update whenever it's convenient for you.
I also think Windows' native window tiling is one of its best features, but there's a fantastic program called Swish that implements tiling for MacOS in a very native-feeling way. It supports keyboard shortcuts, but it's built around really elegant touchpad gestures. Highly recommend if that's all that's keeping you on Windows.
The other native Windows feature I really like is the clipboard manager, and I don't have a great replacement for that yet. I'm kind of shocked Apple hasn't built one. If anyone has a recommendation that feels native instead of like a ported Linux widget, please share.
They mentioned Visual Studio, as in full-fat VS, not VS Code. That's only ever going to run on Windows.
It actually did run on MacOS until recently. Personally I like Rider over Studio, but yes, if that's a hard requirement they are stuck.
No, it was not real Visual Studio on MacOS, it was rebranded Xamarin IDE.
I'm using Raycast on Mac, it has a bunch of stuff included but I use it only for its Clipboard History extension.
Apple did introduce one this past fall as part of Spotlight
The only tolerable Windows 11 experience is a corporate PC with Active Directory login.
And an IT department vetting updates before they go out.
Was it the 8 to 10 upgrade that MS slipped into Windows Update or a different one? Whichever it was, the IT department where I was at the time had apparently left Windows Update untouched and it wreaked havok.
the same IT department that got blamed not allowed user changing wallpaper or installing crowstrike
Use LTSC. It'll fix all the issues you are mentioning here.
Second ltsc -look into it once you try you will never go back. Available from various resellers nowadays. It is, what windows should be sold as.
AFAIK Office isn't supported on LTSC fka. LTSB.
Installed LTSB for a conservative superior. He just wanted to work, without changes. I supported that happily. Until we had to start using Office 365.
Or did they revert that restriction?
LTSC cannot be bought as a regular customer unfortunately. Legally, regular customers are only allowed to use the enshittified version.
Ditto. I've found it pretty tolerable once I've used "ShutUp10!" to disable the annoying stuff. I've used harder tools than it, but I've then found it breaks useful stuff (like the Xbox Gaming stuff, which some MSFT games use).
Get Windows LTSC instead and run Firefox ! Most problems solved.
is not mozilla advertising company, that heavilly pushes AI? How is their spying any different from microsoft?
Don't forget the search that doesn't work. You have app "X" installed? You type X and it doesn't find it, but gives you irrelevant results about X.
Windows' search has been broken for multiple generations now. Some people inside Microsoft seemingly even know, that's why the PowerToys team created "PowerToys Run." A Windows Search that actually basically functions correctly.
People act like it sudden was broken in Windows 11 when in reality it never worked correctly in 7, 8, 8.1, or 10 either. Instead of fixing it, they've only made it worse. It seems like nobody in Microsoft works on core stuff anymore.
If memory serves, Windows 2000 was the last version where search worked reliably. It was a simple linear search through files which could take a while on larger folders, but was reliable and predictable since it did not rely on a background indexing service which seems to get stale or just plain wrong most of the time.
If I search for “foo”, I’d like to get all files containing “foo” please, without a shadow of a doubt that some files were skipped, including those that I have recently created. I still can’t get that as of Windows 11!
> It was a simple linear search through files which could take a while on larger folders, but was reliable and predictable since it did not rely on a background indexing service which seems to get stale or just plain wrong most of the time.
It would be easy to have your cake and eat it too. Have the file search default to the index. Allow frustrated users to then click a button that says "search harder" which would initiate the full enumeration of the relevant filesystems. Of course some UX professional will tell me I'm wrong, they don't like anything they didn't think of themselves.
Yeah, I've never experienced Windows search ever working. Even on XP, it couldn't find commonly opened folders or programs for me. It always felt like some sort of joke feature just meant to fool me into wasting time.
As far as I remember it was working well in 7 and 8 (deterministic and shows programs that you expect it to show). From 10 it started behaving erratically (same time it got binged but maybe unrelated).
It had problems in 8. I would frequently type my search term, see it was the number one result. I would then attempt to arrow or tab down and hit enter to launch that result. Between arrowing down and hitting enter, the result list would update/reorder and suddenly I'm launching some unknown program. Happened all the time.
It's weird how it does seem to do something even though it doesn't do anything. You can see the search indexer running and it's pulling a varying amount of power towards some kind of goal but nobody seems to know what it is. Does it build an index that always corrupts? Is it in a loop of crashing and restarting itself? And it's been like this my whole life practically. It really shows how anything can be normalized if it goes on long enough.
At one point (last year?) internet search results would load in first so quickly typing and pressing "enter" from muscle memory would often result in opening some internet page instead of the app you wanted..
Then also in the past year or two the internet search results were lagging the entire search UI causing type jank and stutters.
I disabled internet results in the registry but a recent update seems to have caused that setting to no longer apply ;(
>> would often result in opening some internet page instead of the app you wanted.
and even worse, in Edge!
One of the first things to do on a fresh install is to disable the Web search results in Start menu search. There's a setting in the registry to do it.
Same problem on MacOS.
...where we get to one of the best things about Windows: there is a free (and probably open source) tool for everything: https://www.voidtools.com/
Recently I'm finding MSN home opened in Chrome over night. Aparently it's connected to some "active probing" feature, and I do have scheduled nightly restarts in the home router. But come on... No one could convince me it's not intended to inflate MSN numbers.