Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:46 Sponsor: TuxCare Radar
02:23 Windows 11 is failing right now
05:20 What’s the job of an OS?
06:51 Updates break systems. Often.
10:53 You have to adapt to it
15:14 It’s highly intrusive
17:44 Debloating tools don’t make it good
20:19 Windows fails at being an OS
21:33 Alternatives are better, but not perfect
27:23 Windows is a sales platform, not an OS
Can I trademark Sloperating System?
I think GN beat you to it
except for the embedded license revenues the multitudes keep paying.
I’m a linux user but this is so cringe.
I know this is a Linux space, and I love Linux but my Windows 11 box runs just fine. I haven’t had any problems with it.
I use MacOS and Win11 every single day. I used Linux for a long time, I still have my CD I got from Canonical with Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake LTS. Naturally, fanboys of all three will talk about each as if it were the obvious choice. IMHO they’re all good in their own respective ways. It’s a Venn diagram made up of adoption/support, simplicity, and openness.
This year alone I had to reinstall 3 Windows systems that were failing to work. Then again, my Windows 11 work laptop also seems to work just fine.
Well that sucks. I hope everything keeps running from now on.
Maybe it’s because I neutered my W11 and only dual boot to launch the occasional game or Windows specific driver, but… I haven’t had significant issues with W11? Not that I can remember over the past two years.
No broken updates, no weird copilot things, no excessive background usage, nothing. The only maintenance I do is manually updating graphics drivers.
It wastes none of my time.
The one issue I had was the LG monitor debacle, that tried to install Mcafee, but that was LG’s fault (and I’m never, ever buying an LG display again, as long as I live. I hope you’re happy, LG marketing).
I find this remarkable, because to me it means, Windows doesn’t have to be junk, yet they deliberately configure it that way, and make it extremely difficult to undo. I used a slew of tools neuter it, but I’d have no idea where to start without them.
And to be clear, I use Linux 90% of the time, so I’m not advocating for Windows or anything.
Maybe it’s because I neutered my W11 and only dual boot to launch the occasional game or Windows specific driver
Yes, it’s that. If you’d use it as your daily driver, you would notice. I do tech support at work and there’s hardly a month that goes by without a Win 11 machine sitting on my desk that has - miraculously! - fucked-up drivers or other issues after an “update”.
Windows updates the computer and I swear my ram speed went down.
I have experienced all of that on my work machine. Its a mess of breakage and glitches and background stalls. Group policy initially stopped copilot but now its back again… And its always just enough to mess up your mouse flow
I think a lot of the issues people experience on windows can be mitigated by disabling certain things or as you said “neutering” it. Back when I used windows 10 as my main OS, I did a lot of modification to make it better and it was alright, but windows 11 has also experienced a lot more bugs and criticism just being generally worse. Worse resource management, less user freedom, more tracking, more ai, newer CPU requirements, and that’s all just off the top of my head.
Any neutering tool recommendations?
Honestly I don’t know which projects are up to date, so I’m afraid to recommend what I vaguely remember.
Search GitHub/Gitlab for “windows debloat” or similar concepts, and sort the results by date updated (e.g. the most recent commit). This is precisely what I’d do with a fresh Windows install, anyway.
On top of that, I go through running services one by one and disable the ones I don’t need.
I disable Defender active protection (except for the firewall/anti tamper) as well, as it absolutely tanks the performance of many applications. As one example I measured, it multiplies the startup time for modded Rimworld, and dramatically slows game ticks. It seems to slow Cyberpunk 2077 as well, but not as reproducibly.
Most “debloaters” won’t do this, as it’s generally not a good idea. But I treat my Windows partition as disposable: nothing sensitive stored, no sensitive data accessible on drives nor networks, data on a separate partition. If it was infected, I could wipe it and reinstall without a care.
AtlasOS
Always has been
I have to use it for work, and the difference between how my work laptop and my personal laptop (Debian 43) handles basic tasks is stark.
The stuff like “will my headphones work?” has been solved for years at this point. I’m talking even more basic, like rendering the UI and loading menus.
“will my headphones work?”
It was Linux the one you had to check if basic peripherals would work.
Now it is windows the one that gives issues with headphones, the one in charge of the equipment at my office is fed up with all of the complaints related to windows and headphones (the ones provided by the employer and the personal ones).
Last Friday windows decided to stop working with the laptop’s webcam, and it was stuck as in use despite even turning off the camera in setttings.
All our work Teams calls are colleagues swearing because their Bluetooth is messed up, or Windows changed their default audio device (again)
You still will run into issues with certain Bluetooth headphones on Linux because they either need proprietary codecs that just aren’t available or fall back to really shitty ones. Not Linux’ fault, but users will only see (or hear) that it doesn’t work properly.
Examples you have noted, sir; for awareness’ sake.
I’d have to ask, they weren’t mine. But part of the problem was that it’s either high latency and no mic or very low quality both ways, neither very usable for video conferencing. Was fine on Windows. I’m sure their Thinkpad’s shitty Mediatek Bluetooth module didn’t help either.
you know what’s funny, is that my noise cancelling headphones started to have serious problems when I ‘upgraded’ to windows 11. it would pick up the noise cancelling mics and decide they were the primary, not my standalone dedicated microphone.
in the process, it would also downgrade the sound quality for some fucking reason. no matter how many ways I disabled them, it would either re-enable them or I’d find a new way to try.
with Linux? just works.
100%. I’m not quite as ardently anti-Windows as most on this community from a UI/UX standpoint, but both Bluetooth and audio device switching are genuinely terrible experiences in Windows. I find myself pairing audio devices from scratch all the time on my work laptop, and it’s painful every time.
Ehh their UI sucks moving copy and paste from the right click menu to the top of the right click menu as icons sucks.
What is the future like? knowing the slow cadence of debian you must be from the very far future.
I use a focusrite scarlet 2i2 2nd gen audio interface for my microphone. The driver hasn’t been updated for a few years now but even when it was recent, I had issues with my mic quality randomly breaking, making me sound like a robot to my friends. I have had zero issues since switching to linux without even installing any special software for it.
The only thing I kind of miss is that windows allowed me to mix down both mic inputs to a single mono channel whereas on linux both inputs are presented as separate mono channels. I suppose I could fix it with some 3rd party tools but I did not miss it too much so far.
Yep, been over a year now on Linux, I’ll never go back.
Glad I don’t use Win11
windows in general has always been a failure. I love how now I can solve most problems
Yep don’t believe me see what kids on windows are doing(fixing what should have been already fixed years back)
Why would people running Linux even care about the success/failure of Windows 11?
It’s a nice circle jerk, but it has way more market share than Linux (at least on desktop, which y’know it’s a desktop OS), so by that measure it is a “success”.
You have to really stretch to some abstract definition of success to call it a failure.
Version 11 didn’t make that market share happen. It inherited that from win XP
Yes, all those XP machines kept upgrading…
No, the actual market share of Windows 11 specifically, even against other Windows OS’s, far surpasses Linux.
People kept using and buying what they already knew, it’s not that hard to understand. Even if the new installment is shit, it’s still familiar, and for many that goes above any other argument.
Kind of a dubious claim, in the context of Windows not having nearly as much market dominance as they used to, and Linux adoption being far higher than it used to. Linux as a platform now has enough of a userbase that even companies like Epic are beginning to take it seriously.
Meanwhile reviews of Windows these days are so nearly universally poor, they are basically coasting on nothing but the inertia of their own previous success - which is eroding.
Capitalist brain.
It’s a market success and a performance failure. Not much of a stretch of any definition.
