I don’t really like Windows but it’s for my gaming PC. My laptop does run linux. I don’t know much of anything about 11 and whether it’s better or not.
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No, install linux
I upgraded 10 to 11 and really liked it. Problem with linux is all the commandline if you want to do advanced stuff.
Then i got a gpt-4 subscription and installed arch linux with hyperland. I aint looking back, everytime i use a windows system now it feels slow and prehistoric… sometimes though you get some weird problem you just don’t wanna deal with at the time and then its briefly booting into windows again.
Windows 11 is extremely spyware, even more so than previous windows versions.
Thats why you enable the telemetry thing in the motherboard for the installation only and prolly disable it afterwards :p no warning errors, no fuss. Works. Shows how shit it is that they require it.
Uhhhh what telemetry thing in the motherboard?
If you mean the TPM, that’s not for telemetry, it’s for security. It does still have some implications you might not enjoy though - IF you use bitlocker on Windows AND have TPM enabled, I believe you can’t move your drive to another device because it requires the original device’s TPM for decryption (and no, you can’t just swap out a TPM module either - it won’t be the considered the same device). That’s about all you need to fear from the TPM.
All the windows telemetry stuff is in Windows settings. And of course there’s some you can’t disable in windows settings either, but there’s scripts for stuff and you can run pihole and block every non-essential microsoft domain.
TPM isn’t for your security, it’s for Microsoft and Disney and other megacorps’ security against you
That’s a side effect of your device being more secure, yes. After all, the most secure device is a simple rock. Nobody can hack it and it can’t rip Marvel movies off Disney+.
To be clear, Microsoft doesn’t give a single fuck about you doing piracy, they actually need your device to be secure because otherwise you might switch to another OS for security. Disney and the like, however, will likely in the future require you to use a TPM2 device for advanced DRM.
Of course, if this is something you’re rightly worried about, the right course of action isn’t to install Windows and disable TPM (which also, as I said, does nothing for disabling Telemetry). It’s to install a Linux distro that’s hopefully not Ubuntu, because that’s way too commercial and not free enough.
Also, at the moment, the Linux desktop install base is small enough that any streaming service can just disable their services for Linux users altogether, TPM or not. So we do actually need to be voting with our OS installs and sooner rather than later.
What does it mean to be secure? Allowing a megacorp to mandate what you can and can’t do on your own hardware means that hardware is less secure, not more.
The way it was explained to me was that TPM allows windows to get a unique identifier for your motherboard which is supposedly similary to how nvidia identifies users for telemetry with gpus. But i digress i am not an expert on these particular kinds of tech.
Why would windows make it mandatory if its only required for an optional feature?
Your motherboard already has a unique identifier, as does your CPU, your GPU, and I believe your RAM too. It’s how their licensing system can tell when your existing Windows install has been transferred to another set of hardware You can overwrite data on your motherboard, but it’s like 0.0001% of users who’d do that, so Microsoft doesn’t care.
Now, it’s possible there are errors in what I’m saying, I’m not an expert. But.
TPM allows Windows to make sure it’s still on the exact same machine it was on before, for sure. No trickery. So if you lock your drive with Bitlocker using TPM, it’s not possible to just clone your drive and try to unlock in another machine. Any data theft requires the user to have possession of the exact machine you configured it on, in addition to your Windows/Microsoft password. And if someone does something funky with your motherboard firmware, you can’t unlock the drive either, because it’s no longer the same trusted one. At the same time, a legitimate firmware update from the manufacturer can screw things up too if they’re negligent about it. I believe Bitlocker has recovery keys for occasions such as this.
It’s also a sort of a secure key storage I believe, so things like Windows Hello facial recognition use it (Apple similarly uses T2 for touch ID on modern macs, but since touch ID came before T2, I’m not sure what they used before).
TL;DR: It has security features, some of them allow for comfort features, some for stuff you don’t need too much as a regular joe, but Microsoft is enforcing better security defaults like this because there are ridiculously obscure threats out there and they don’t want to be known as “the operating system that gets the most viruses” anymore.
Oh I absolutely understand there are proper usecases for TPM like all our work laptops have bit locker enabled. But my personal device is a Diy desktop of Theseus that doesnt leave my house and it doesn’t really have all that much sensitive data anyway. My main issue with tracking/identifiers/telemetry is they use it to serve ads tailored to my behaviors they learned from the data they verified from me using those same identifiers. I am something of an anti-advertisement extremist for psychological reasons. There designed to get in my head and physically hurt.
You think the treacherous computing module actually obeys your command to stop betraying you?
If i cant trust my bios to actually disable certain features when i disable them there then i might aswell worry that they installed a secret kernel acces mini os that spys on any os i might use.
They did. Intel calls it the Secure Element, AMD calls it the Platform Security Processor.
Doing a quick google to find info about Platform Security Processor states that if you cant find the security processor section on the device security screen it means tpm is disabled. This does lead me to believe that disabling TPM at least disables windows acces to the security processor, windows cant directly use features i have directly disabled in the bios at least not without that acces.
Or how far does this rabbit hole go exactly? I cant trow every windows device out il have to change job and my wife be pissed.
I used to use Windows all the time, but now I only use it for gaming. It’s kind of weird to me how many Microsoft apps there are for Linux now.
Linux gaming has become much more viable of late with proton
Indeed, quite a suprise when i realized you can use lutrius to straight up start and play games installed on my windows drive.
😲 Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
@lemon @webghost0101 You can even achieve that with just #Wine. I carefully set up my Wine on my two devices with #DXVK on one and #GalliumNine on the other. Took a while, to be honest.
But now, together with wine-binfmt and icoutils, I can just double-click any #Windows game. 🍷
Lutris does pretty much all the main game stores. GOG, Steam, Uplay, EAOrigin, Epic. IIRC they also have custom wine scripts to install with recommended settings so you almost always have the best config out of the box.
There’s also Heroic, which only does GOG and Epic, but is a bit cleaner and easier to use.
Lol, you installed Arch Linux, with Hyperland, and the complained about how it requires CLI for advanced stuff?
Try Linux Mint or something simpler. At least pick a fair comparison for change.
No no, you read my comment wrong. I used to complain about the cli and lack of gui while trying ubuntu… with a gui.
I am loving my arch setup. And i aint changing soon. Even if really its gpt-4 being a massive mvp to tell me how to do stuff.
Its wasnt as much the cli stuff or any of the advanced stuff i wanted that was the problem but just that my autistic ass needed some easy/good accessible help to learn it in a way schools,google and youtube never could. Commandline is fun now and i look forward to seeing the random pokemon i get every time.
Ah I see! I missed the ‘then’ part and assumed you’re describing the setup you’re complaining about.
What version of Ubuntu were you using? While I have felt like this in the past, it’s been improving more and more to a point I could configure all I need without CLI (selection of toolset does come a long way).
Not sure but it was a desktop version with a gui. This was on my dedicated server so not my main machine that i switched to arch. I’ve actually went to completely remove that ubuntu which was a mess from my own misdoings and experiments and started from scratch with the last LTS version of linux-server, fully in commandline. In less then a weekend i restored all the initial functionality, fixed the previously broken functionality and added some extra features to it. But again the moment i dont know how to do something i am skipping google straight for the AI genie.
Hyprland - so a window manager? Sorry, don’t use Linux so not sure what you’re gaining.
How does GPT-4 help with Arch? Can it run commands in the console?
I’m heavily reliant on Photoshop and related Adobe software for work, so I’ll have to stick with MacOS for now, but Linux sounds very tempting.
Incidentally, I use Magnet for window management, and it is the bee’s knees, especially since I mapped out shortcuts for my preferred placements 😍
Also, Raycast is my homeboy ❤️
Hyperland is a windows manager yes because i have cognitive challenges that require visual sorting of information.
What i gain? Super sayan levels of fast. Productivity goes brrr. Completely customizable (really into that) and it looks and feels sweet AF. This is with the hyperdot configuration found here, check out the vid. https://github.com/prasanthrangan/hyprdots
GPT-4: it knows linux much much better then i do. I have no api so i cant just give the command box but stuff like: “provide easy to follow instructions and commands to set up x, y, z” wielded me way better result then trying the same stuff alone in linux before. I completely redid a server project i worked for more then a year on in less then a weekend. I also use it as a command cheatsheet because i suck at remembering commands and the answers on google are burried Between ads.
Photoshop: This was a worry of myself aswell, a friend send me this “https://github.com/Gictorbit/photoshopCClinux“ Havent tried yet but its not the only option either. As i said elsewhere you can often straight up run windows installed exes from a different drive using lutrius and proton.
I am gonna need to checkout Magnet and Raycast. They seem very promising for my job where i can only use Windows.
Good luck if you try it! (Maybe in a vm at first)
All too familiar. I’ve been using Linux for years now but still keep a drive with Windows 10 just to use Photoshop from time to time. I really tried to migrate over to GIMP and Krita and they are amaizing tools for 80% of what I need them, but they are still not on the same level as Photoshop sadly.
For the problem thing, I use timeshift.
Hit a snag? Boot into a system state from a few weeks back and deal eith it later.
The problem was the specialized software from samsung to sideload jellyfin on my tv not working properly but i second that timeshift is not a luxery on these kind of systems. If i only need windows now and then for sm specialized then thats ok, hope to move windows into just a vm soon.
I have to admit, I still have a windows partition, but I honestly haven’t booted into it for a full year now. The only thing I can think of needing it for, is firmware updates to my logitech peripherals, but that’s something I can live without.
There will always be something that will only work on windows, but that list is getting short enough now that the number of people it’s a problem for has begun to shrink, too.
This is the answer. I didn’t even bother fixing my windows install since I migrated my gaming PC to Garuda Linux. Everything I need works without a hitch.
OP, thanks for being the sacrificial lamb here. Now I know never to ask a question about Windows if I don’t want to hear irrelevant opinions from Linux snobs. Sorry you didn’t get a lot of real answers.
I keep hoping that new sites will be better about this. And while I understand the reasons why this happens it still saddens me that it still does.
Lemmy as a platform is built on FOSS. There are going to be Linux/FOSS advocates all over here.
I say this as primarily a windows admin who recently started diving into Linux.
The “real answer” is that Windows 10 is supported until October 2024. You have until then to make your decision or switch to an alternative because after that, W10 won’t be getting more updates and you risk running an unsecure system at that point.
There’s a difference between advocating for Linux in its own threads or where especially relevant (no problem!) and every Windows question getting answered with just “use Linux instead!” (aggravating and unhelpful).
I’ve certainly seen worse than this thread in this regard, however.
Its not a linux issue. If you go into linux threads there’s plenty of people advocating for windows.
Even through the question is asking about windows 10 vs 11 it still makes sense to suggest alternatives.
Honestly, I completely agree with the sentiment, although in this particular case OP just asked “upgrade to 11 or Linux?” While indicating that they already have some degree of comfort with Linux after having it on a laptop, so the Linux advocates in this thread have a bit of a leg to stand on in this case.
However: when there are questions like “how do I do X in Y software on Z operating system” it’s completely valid to be frustrated with the evangelists who come out of the woodwork and say “just use this other OS” because it completely misses the point of the question.
And that goes for Windows, Mac, and Linux evangelists.
In short, no.
In detail, nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
To add to this… ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
You mean 0x00000000000?
In my opinion, it is not. Even though the UI of W11 is great, the ux is terrible, full of distractions and shit you don’t need.
If you don’t want to fight against your system just use Windows 10 LTSC and run https://christitus.com/windows-tool/, https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 and https://rentry.co/properedgeuninstalling
Also remember to use a firewall, I personally recommend safing.io
Another option for a debloated, lighter windows 10/11 is ameliorated.io, but don’t bother with it if you’re not tech-savy/willing to learn stuff
I think I will try this first, though I appreciate all the replies people sent.
I like windows 11 better than 10. The UI is better (besides the basic start menu all apps thing) but, I’m just about done with microsoft I think… For the same reason I left reddit, I don’t want to be a commodity. With all the telemetry that is undoubtedly being sent from my windows OS (even when disabling everything I can) it makes me uncomfortable (even with my pihole on my network)… Getting more and more comfortable with linux as a daily driver. For years, linux was always just those work computers I’ve dealt with but the more I want to get away from being a product. The more I realize linux is what I need.
I have Windows 11 on my notebook and Windows 10 on my gaming PC.
Please, for the love of god (or your precious sanity), use Windows 10. :D
My laptop had a lot of issues with stability while gaming. I tried win10 and the issues were completely gone… My new desktop came with win11 and has no stability issues 🤯
I still prefer the win10 UI.
Honestly if you’re ok with a little tinkering you can use Linux for gaming nowadays.
I fully switched about a week ago using NixOS, so far it’s been pretty smooth sailing, and generally better performance than when it ran windows
Have run overwatch, diablo, modded Minecraft (with shaders) and a bunch of steam games so far.
Have yet to run epic games on it but I’ve heard it’s pretty seamless with a launcher called heroic (which imo works better than epic’s own one anyway)
Only games I’ve found that don’t work are because of deliberate effort on the devs’ part (Halo MCC, Roblox and dragon ball breakers)
Depending on the game tinkering may not be needed. With proton most of my games except like dead by daylight it was install and press play
Dead by Daylight is actually running now on linux after the devs chose to unblock linux in EAC.
Oh yeah absolutely the only tinkering I’ve really needed to do is make sure I installed steam properly (NixOS) and a little bit of jiggery pokery for battle.net games (though battle.net is actually really good, you just give it a path to the game files and away you go)
Thankfull y I don’t have to stress with tinkering on mint but I get the advantages nixos has
Never tried mint but weirdly enough NixOS has been the easiest distro for me so far, haven’t run into any weird bugs in drivers or my touchpad not working after hibernation etc like I have in Ubuntu based distros
(Other than the bugs I caused myself that is)
One of the many reasons I use mint is it does things better significantly than Ubuntu based distros
The main difference will be if you have an Intel processor generation 10 or higher. The whole reason windows 11 was created is because Intel released their asymmetrical core architecture in the 10th generation processors.
One of the core parts of an operating system is the CPU scheduler. This is what juggles all the different things that are happening in the fore and background in order to make the computer work properly. On the surface the CPU scheduler is a rather simple function as far as reading and understanding the code, but it is the kind of thing that a tiny change can have massive repercussions in unexpected ways. It is designed to have a delicate balance that is very easy to screw up.
One of the fundamental aspects of the CPU scheduler used in W10 is that it assumes all of the cores your computer has are the same. Rewriting the CPU scheduler required a whole new rewrite of Windows to accommodate a much more complex architecture with some faster and some slower cores and a different spin up rate to go from idle to max speed on the two types, along with some differences in speed even on cores with adjacent threads. It also required changes to cache management strategies. This still isn’t fully publicly documented for W11. I just know the way the scheduler changed in Linux and watched a conference with John Brown, the main Intel open source developer who mentioned that the 10th gen asymmetry was the main trigger for W11.
Win11 also supports something called DirectStorage which is useful for gaming, but I don’t know any games which support it.
Wasn’t directstorage ported back to 10?
Windows 11 is fine. It looks less ugly than Windows 10 and has some nice things like a properly organized settings menu (finally).
It still features two separate system control panels where some features are only accessible in one or the other, and you have to guess which setting is where. However, the new system controls panels is indeed much more usable in Windows 11 than in 10, agreed.
It’s such a subjective question. As a result, the answers you get will confuse you even more. It really depends on what type of user you are, and what software and hardware you have. Most basic users will notice some graphical changes, but not much else. I am not one of these people and use my desktop for everything from gaming, writing, music, and drawing. I am perfectly happy with 11 over 10. Yes, it has little annoyances, but then every version of Windows does. Those saying version X was great, are simply wearing those rose-tinted glasses. The perfect operating system does not exist, simply because us users are such a varied bunch. So catering to us all at once will create friction and issues.
The simple answer is, if you’re going to stick with Windows rather than move to Linux, then upgrade. You will have to do it at some point. So long as you don’t do it within the first six months of the new version of Windows being released. Then you will be fine. The later you leave it, the less time you have to become comfortable with it before you ask this question again about the next upgraded version of Windows.
I don’t know. Windows 7 was widely considered to be the nadir.
Just throwing out there that nowadays the only games that don’t work on Linux are multiplayer ones with intrusive unsupported anti-cheat (for support see areweanticheatyet.com) and Gamepass games (and others from the Microsoft store). And VR is finicky.
If you don’t play those you could also go Linux on your gaming PC. Or wait until Windows 10 support runs out and look at the situation then.
No <-- The actual post Honestly have experienced quite a bit issues with Windows rather than Windows 10, not to mention the design wise they went with Windows 11… its terrible not to mention several issues that has happened (couple of them not fixed as of yet)
11 is better in my experience, I like that they added tabs to explorer and terminal
I use both (different machine), and find the difference minimal. Terminal has tabs on Win 10, and there are so many better alternatives to file explorer—I’m using XYPlorer now but have used many others.
There may be other reasons to upgrade of course.
Also on 10 tabs can be added to the terminal
For me it was a nice improvement. I liked the new window snapping feature that allows to you quickly snap an application to half or a quarter of your screen. But honestly there aren’t that many differences compared to my work laptop on Windows 10, I never regretted updating though.
I also used Linux for gaming, most of the time you will be able to get things to work. But sometimes you will have small issues in games and way worse support from the developers.
On a super recent Intel CPU with BIG.little architecture, I believe 11 has better scheduling. One day when games start to make use for it, 11 has DirectStorage and I believe 10 doesn’t?
If you have an ultrawide display, you might appreciate the start button in the middle.
And that’s about all the pros of Windows 11. Now for the cons: They’ve greatly dumbed down the context menu, so now you have to click the “more options” or whatever button nearly every time. Also it’s possible that they fixed it a already but when I tried 11 near launch, the context menu took about 2 seconds to appear. Zen 2 CPU, 32 GB of decent DDR4 and an NVMe boot drive so it should be snappy And it’s Windows. I right click on EVERYTHING because I’m not used to the weird-ass non-unix console. Gimme right click -> 7-zip -> extract to (subfolder), not right click -> wait 2 seconds -> show more options -> 7-zip -> extract to (subfolder)
But overall, Windows 11 isn’t all that different. There are some UI changes, but it’s surviveable.
I too am in the “Only stuck on Windows for gaming” crowd. My previous jaunt going full Linux was by far the most successful, but Nvidia’s poor Linux support and performance once again led me back to the Microsoft world on Desktop.
re: context menu
Don’t trust me here, or any post giving commands like this. You can search for steps to revert the context menu to pre-simplified versions. You can do the same as this command manually using regedit and finding the correct keys/etc… After this, reboot and you have your menu back to a usable state.
reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /veI know it’s possible, but honestly, I just went back to 10 because I wanted to reinstall anyway (among other reasons, to greatly reduce my Windows partition size, which could technically be done in place, but it’s nicer when you don’t need to concern yourself with the physical data layout on the drive - I don’t wanna defrag my SSD lol).
It’s entirely possible I’ll quit using Windows for good before the 2025 deadline even hits. Linux gaming is just getting pretty good these days.
To be fair, I don’t mind the context menu once you get apps that actually use it. 7-zip in particular was a pain point for me, but it’s because the developer doesn’t want to use the “new” (since Windows 7) method to hook into the context menu, which is what populates the menu in 11. There’s a fork called NanaZip that does that and more. Alternatively, this little tool will let you add custom entries to the context menu rather easily. I used it to get the “Add to VLC playlist” option back as that was my other major pain point.
Of course you can always do the registry hack to get the old one back, but I actually like some aspects of it.
There is a registry entry that reverts 11 to the old context menu behavior.
Sure, but nearly every Linux desktop environment I’ve tried has been great out of the box and configuration is presented to you in a settings application rather than in registry, where you have to google how to do anything.
