Windows 11 still sucks.

[Mæstro]

Benchmarks are not everything, but people seem to like them for ‘objective’ evaluations. I had this in mind.
Seriously now, we should agree to disagree about the relative merits or comparability of Windows XP and 11.

[Moonchild]

I think if you're going to talk about alternatives you should at least stay within the same broad family, i.e. Windows 7 through 11.

[Mæstro]

I can accept this condition; my jocular and serious statements all stand with 7 instead of XP, except perhaps the giddy dream of third-party security patching. I think this should be less controversial. My attitudes about XP are sincere: my goal was not to provoke, and I am sorry if I ended up doing so.

[Moonchild]

Not a sensitive topic for me, just trying to be realistic. XP is just a completely different generation that just can't be compared. Not just in the way it looks, but down to the very technology it's built on. Windows 7 was almost a complete do-over of the core tech underpinning Windows (I don't really count Vista; that was a beta/work-in-progress)

[UCyborg]

I've got the impression over the years that a lot comments over the years pertaining to one Windows version or the other are biased. Although that may be difficult to avoid, also considering rather extensive documentation of additions and omissions of features throughout Windows development on Wikipedia. That and humans forming emotional attachment to particular OS version I suppose.

[Moonchild]

Absolutely a valid point to make, but the reason I started this topic is because I found a disproportionate amount of things with Windows 11 leading to negative experiences trying to use it for its intended purposes. That's not really bias, but rather taking a step back and evaluating how it's been doing since launch. And it's not been good, objectively.

[UCyborg]

I don't disagree with that. Windows 8 was still subtle, at least if you knew about Classic Shell. Then I'm sure that for a lot of people, it would appear as Windows 7 with flat theme and multi-monitor taskbar.

[Mæstro]

When most people speak of Windows 8 today, I think they might have 8·1 in mind. I would love to find the twenty-minute review, made in GoAnimate, about how abysmal the original Windows 8’s user interface was. I distinctly recall it using the metaphor of a goblin appearing at random times to fart in the user’s face. It must be buried somewhere on YouTube. Encountering it had shaped my attitudes toward the direction of IT at a critical time.

[Octopuss]

Windows 8 had such terrible reputation, mostly because of the dramatic GUI fuckery I guess, that I didn't even bother seeing for myself.

I've been using Win 11 for a while now, and honestly if they allowed for all the bloat to be uninstalled, underneath seems to be a system that works pretty decently, possibly no worse or slower than 10. But maybe I just have good enough hardware. At this point I probably I don't even care about spying, telemetry or whatever (while I am strictly opposed to the concept it's probably not even as bad as lots of people put it, as in Microsoft probably isn't saving my chats or emails), I just want the fucking thing to be stable and performant enough.

[Night Wing]

Most of the gamers who come into our computer repair shop who are now using and not liking Windows 11, they are complaining about "frame performance". In essence, when they were playing their games on Windows 10, the same games were much slower when using Windows 11.

[frostknight]

At this point I probably I don't even care about spying, telemetry or whatever (while I am strictly opposed to the concept it's probably not even as bad as lots of people put it, as in Microsoft probably isn't saving my chats or emails), I just want the fucking thing to be stable and performant enough.

This puzzles me about most people. I mean fascism is a thing in the world. What would happen if someone with very evil intentions like Hitler or Putin came to power? in your country I might add w/e that is. That is what I think most people need to think to realize how dangerous the spying is.

Although, not everyone thinks to do that and maybe some avoid it due to the terror that would bring.

As for microsoft's oS being stable, I observe in most youtube chats that people are very pissed about stability of windows though as well as their ignoring user choice. They (microsoft) also seems to hate power users from what I read online.

It is possible youtube just has the loudest voices of course. But I wonder how representative it is of the whole public.

[Octopuss]

I still don't like it and turn it off where possible (mostly by simply running OO Shutup 10 after every install), but I have no way of telling what else is going on that people aren't aware of, and so in the end if Microsoft is harvesting some anonymized data, I'm like fuck it, what can I do anyway? We can't win this, it's never getting better anyway, and unlike all the bloatware this is not negatively affecting my experience with the OS.
Basically I'm just tired to care anymore. That is unless someone finds out Windows is actually harvesting real personal data somehow. That would be the point I would at least TRY to switch to Linux.

[Mæstro]

…what can I do anyway? We can't win this, it's never getting better anyway,

There are several answers to this. Personally, I had won the Windows 11 battle without ever needing to fight it, simply because I abandoned Windows well in advance. I have friends who are shackled to Windows 11 by specific applications, so I appreciate the difficulties involved. On a larger scale, the battle can be won through political action. If Brussels mandates that Windows users must have an easy way to access the LTSC version or otherwise disable all telemetry, permanently uninstall Copilot and other worthless software etc, then Microsoft has just got to do it. It worked with Internet Explorer. Democracies where the people have the power actually still exist, hard as it might be to believe. (Even in many which appear to be failing now, I think the underlying institutions are stronger than given credit, but this is not a political post, so I will not elaborate.) Our position is lost if we resign ourselves to it, but not otherwise. Chiappetti’s signature Shaw quote applies here.

[frostknight]

Basically I'm just tired to care anymore. That is unless someone finds out Windows is actually harvesting real personal data somehow. That would be the point I would at least TRY to switch to Linux.

And that is the problem... they do. Have you not heard about prism and the Snowden revelations?

Ditching windows for these reasons are wise.

Although, blocking ads is also wise for the same reasons I have mentioned including and especially the fascist aspect.

I am not saying you must use a fully libre distro or only use A, or that you have to ditch windows.

I am saying it is wise to ditch proprietary oses. to me proprietary means it has anti-features btw

[Mæstro]

And that is the problem... they do. Have you not heard about prism and the Snowden revelations?

There are now adults who were small children when Snowden blew the whistle, and can perhaps be forgiven. Then again, I recall a literal children’s book about as old as such adults (Do Not Open, 2008) which discussed NSA surveillance matter-of-factly.

[frostknight]

There are now adults who were small children when Snowden blew the whistle, and can perhaps be forgiven. Then again, I recall a literal children’s book about as old as such adults (Do Not Open, 2008) which discussed NSA surveillance matter-of-factly.

Off-topic:
I was a teenager who didn't take it seriously enough to escape until like I was 24. I heard about it when I was almost 18 I think.

It angered me that people would dare surveil me based on pointless crap reasons like national security. Anyone in their right mind could see that would have potential for chaos.

People can lose their intellectual property this way. Back then I was still working on what I am now, although I was definitely not good at it back then.

In any case though, as of 3+ years ago, I wised up even more and realized something important:

Criminals and bad guys of all types, will disable these backdoors by any means necessary, illegal or legal.

So it basically means this prism pat-riot act crap only works on suveiling the innocent. Which also means they want to be aware of dissenters/critics of theirs.

Which means it was never EVER about national security.

I didn't think in those terms back when I was a teenager due to lots of toxic crap eroding my mind.

But when some of that disappeared, I figured out this to be true.

And it was like:

How are people this stupid not to understand this? inbreeding? constantly headbutting each other? Idk... its all just madness.

[Mæstro]

I didn't think in those terms back when I was a teenager due to lots of toxic crap eroding my mind. But when some of that disappeared, I figured out this to be true.

All of the people I know who bathe in this toxic sludge are, oddly enough, happy to use Windows 11, smartphones and the rest, and have even been those who criticise me the most for abstaining from it. Ten years ago, the far right regarded ‘Big Tech’ as an enemy for ‘censoring’ the worst of what they had to offer, but actual resistance as one sees in the far left (anarchists populate Disroot, for example) is much harder to come by. There have been many abortive clones of mainstream SNS, and the sitting US president presides over a Mastodon instance, but none of this has implied any criticism or even caution towards unbridled technological change on their part. The technology’s role in advancing their politics since the mid-2010s is well documented enough, but it gets worse, of course, as time passes. In a conversation, one defended Google’s ‘AI overviews’ as ‘more reliable than mainstream media’.

[frostknight]

All of the people I know who bathe in this toxic sludge are, oddly enough, happy to use Windows 11, s

Off-topic:
I didn't use linux till 2014.

The toxic sludge I bathed in before, was pride, hatred and narcissism.

I didn't know my own self.

The biggest problem of course is if you do know your own self and you don't care.

I am thankful that isn't me.

Off-topic:
Anywho, , I used windows over and over again until windows 8.1 came out, Then I started to tryv and escape microsoft windows.

Although I disliked their UI since XP. But vista and 10 were super awful for their time as was windows 8

But main point, I guess is, sometimes it takes time to heal a person. Other times its impossible. The times it isn't impossible is when someone fails to acknowledge they have a problem or they don't care.

[andyprough]

Criminals and bad guys of all types, will disable these backdoors by any means necessary, illegal or legal.

So it basically means this prism pat-riot act crap only works on suveiling the innocent. Which also means they want to be aware of dissenters/critics of theirs.

Which means it was never EVER about national security.

I didn't think in those terms back when I was a teenager due to lots of toxic crap eroding my mind.

But when some of that disappeared, I figured out this to be true.

And it was like:

How are people this stupid not to understand this? inbreeding? constantly headbutting each other? Idk... its all just madness.

I'm no expert in these matters, but every single time I've read about someone getting nabbed by the Feds (FBI, Secret Service, DEA, etc) or by someone like Interpol is not because they were using an OS with backdoors, but because they had incredibly bad opsec. They reveal things about their true identity and location in IRC chats, discord chats, in-game chats, on Facebook, on twitter, etc. Or like Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht), he got caught running the Silk Road dark web marketplace on his laptop at a public library, and the cops distracted him from his laptop while it was open and he was logged into his accounts so they could just grab it. Once again, horribly bad opsec. Wouldn't have mattered if any of them was using OpenBSD, or Windows XP, or a Macbook, or whatever.

[frostknight]

. They reveal things about their true identity and location in IRC chats, discord chats, in-game chats, on Facebook, on twitter, etc. Or like Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht), he got caught running the Silk Road dark web marketplace on his laptop at a public library, and the cops distracted him from his laptop while it was open and he was logged into his accounts so they could just grab it. Once again, horribly bad opsec. Wouldn't have mattered if any of them was using OpenBSD, or Windows XP, or a Macbook, or whatever.

Off-topic:
I guess then what I spoke of is intelligent criminals.

But yeah, i think that still proves that backdoors aren't needed on the OS level. Especially if the websites already have them instead.