This might not be a popular opinion, but in my experience stock GNOME is quite the polished experience.

In the grand pantheon of my experience using operating systems, Snow Leopard-era macOS is probably my favorite, mostly due to how smoothly everything worked and the degree to which it got out of my way once I learned the ropes, but GNOME circa Fedora 30 was a close second.

I say stock because I also remember trying out Ubuntu-flavored GNOME at around the same time and the comparison was stark. It felt like Cannonical went out of their way to tweak the environment in ways that sound good on paper, but just added papercuts and made the overall experience less stable.

I also remember trying Manjaro at around the same time. On first boot, the welcome popup that was designed to come out of the taskbar instead popped out of the top left corner of the screen.

Same here, we’ve hit parity with Windows

I guess that’s the difference.

I have used a tiling WM before.

So I wonder whether the benefits you’re seeing in Omarchy are simply the result of using a tiling WM for the first time, which overrode what I believe Omarchy detracted from a general tiling WM.

Or whether my poorer experience was a result of the fact that having used a tiling WM I was more comfortable customizing and so found the Omarchy opinionated behavior restrictive or if the benefits Omarchy brings to someone who’s new to a tiling WM are lost on me.

I've been pretty much exclusively Linux-based for over a decade now, but I used every version of Windows from 3.11 to Windows 7, so I still have some muscle memory from the good ol' days.

Recently I was helping a relative do something on their Windows 11 machine and I asked them to press Windows key + R, type calc, press Enter. And I was astonished at the result. Literally: Mouth agape, frozen in astonishment for about 10 seconds.

I knew about the ads and tracking and the local account bullshit, but I didn't realize just how bad the Windows experience has become.

If it loads at all. The last two days, the start menu refuses to launch it when you click on it.

The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.

I still use a copy of Calc.EXE from Windows 2000 that I just move from machine to machine. It stopped being useful after that. That old one is nice. Hex mode. Starts quickly.

Best part is that on a fresh install without internet you are not able to use it...well all of the modern replacement apps.

It was rewritten into WinUI, hence why.

Apparently this is not entirely true. It’s just a section of the start menu that’s based on React/React Native.

React Native*

I see you were fortunate enough to not use notepad aprox 5 months ago, when they were running the rich formatting preview. It was on by default, and would drop around 5% of the characters you type. Literally failing at the only thing it's supposed to do. I repro'd this on 2 out of 2 machines.

Maybe they fixed it, maybe they haven't. I both turned off formatting and am using vscode for notes now.

I've been a Notepad++ user for about 20 years. It's a pain to use it in Win11 as they force their crappy notepad on context menus and such. It's still usable (with some registry changes) but annoying that they're doogfooding their own an keep on changing settings on updates. I'm only using Win11 at work, I'm done with Windows and MS otherwise.

Yes, some nice to have features were added, but it’s a text editing app, and not a good one at that, so it shouldn’t be crashing like that.

In my opinion this is mostly self-inflicted by Microsoft.

Sure some push for web-based solution has moved a lot of people away from desktop applications, but even before that Microsoft muddied the waters of native UI development.

Moving from User32.dll and GDI to GPU based rendering with WPF, might not have been the worst idea - and WPF is still going strong - but it's a clear cut, leaving old apps un-upgradable. So if companies need to eventually rewrite it, will they stick with desktop apps or move to "web apps"?

Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't stop there, but we've since seen a bunch of different attempts at new Windows UI libs to the point, where nobody trusts Microsoft anymore (remember Silverlight?) and everyone else is left confused by the chaos of an ecosystem.

Why can’t Microsoft employees learn on the job? When I joined a (non-Microsoft) BigTech company, I was expected to learn C++ and internal libraries and tools within a couple months while working on newbie projects. The company recouped that investment many times over.

> The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs

Funny. Back in the 90s Microsoft just hired kind of random kids from college to write their OS in C.

This is directionally not totally off-base, but:

> it's hard to hire native UI developers

This is the pool of mobile devs. If Microsoft is unwilling to eat the lead time (measured in weeks) for an existing native mobile dev to become productive on their stack, that's a sign of much bigger organizational problems.

>The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.

This ... has been very opposite of my experience:

1) I've seen websites turn into poor imitations of mobile apps that lose all the features of web UIs that I want: ability to open links in tabs, use of affordances to scroll up and down, dense packing of information, ability to edit the size, etc. (Edit: almost forgot how they run the back button too!)

2) Generally, I see that the more UI specialists they have, the worse the UI gets. There's the saying, "developers are responsible for mediocre UIs, designers are responsible for horrible UIs".

The reason is that the web empire is just better at operating systems than Microsoft. If they just had less bad development tools for native UI this would not be a problem. Look at what Google does with Android, or Apple.

Excuses, a $4 trillion valued company can surely afford some training on the technology it owns.

The analogy with evolution breaks down because currently the fitness function is broken. It would work in a world where anti trust would be still enforced, where customers could vote with their money instead of having to deal with enshitiffied monopolies. In a world where tech CEOs can buy a dinner to stay above the law, where tech is used as a weapon of influence so that other countries like in the EU are not allowed under penalty of sanctions to not use US platforms even when it breaks their law, it is reassuring for engineer minds but ultimately pointless to explain the state of the industry from market dynamics alone.

That makes little sense, notepad.exe already exists. The only development required on it would be to add AI shit to it. They could just leave it alone.

web is, frighteningly, much faster and more responsive than local desktop apps are now (e.g., gmail is infinitely more responsive than desktop modern outlook generally speaking - even web spreadsheets are superior to modern Excel (though not, say, Excel 2003...))

Linux? You mean the C nest? KDE and QT (the default serious framework) with C++?

You pushed ActiveX on the web, and viceversa with IE4 and Windows98. Now, the web turd came back with Electron. If any, thanks Microsoft for that.

> The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers

Yeah, it's a wonder they were able to do it so many years (ftom win 1.0 to Win 8).

I for one like the comparison of web apps with scrotums

Which is exactly the problem, and isn't UWP, rather WinUI/WinAppSDK, the WinRT version on top of Win32, instead of UWP.

UWP is actually faster, yes that is that bad.

UWP, one of the 10+ frameworks used to run Windows 11's system components. Wonderful! Exemplary!

https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...

Wasn't Wordpad the rich text editor on Windows?

Re "just another program" - the old Notepad was deliberately designed with minimal dependencies so that even if everything else in the system went to hell you'd still have a working editor to try and fix things.

I recommend https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html - it's even snappier than Notepad++

Use MetaPad - like Notepad.

https://liquidninja.com/metapad/

It’s opinionated coming from Arch Linux. Compared to MacOS or Windows it’s a big giant push over. Opinionated in this context just means it comes with defaults rather than asking you to research your own display compositor.

Although there are some places you want that! WireGuard is often described as cryptographically opinionated because it doesn't even bother trying to negotiate crypto primitives which makes it immune to downgrade attacks. Though, to be fair, that also means that if its primitives ever do get broken you need to roll out an entirely new release.

opinionated versus unopinionated is a tradeoff. Things that boast about how unopinionated they are often require a lot of hand holding or manual config. I think there's a big audience of people that have non-Appleware that want an OS that is not Windows, but don't actually care to customize it.

It’s by David Heinemeier Hansson. Based on his writings, he’s very inflexible. He’s even unwilling to accept that a person of color who was born and raised in Britain can be British.

Yeah, it's just one of those, but worse. It's basically run by a bunch of badly written bash scripts:

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/

I think MS's biggest mistake was to not properly maintain and develop the Foundation Classes, basically a thin C++ wrapper library on top of the C API that retained most of the benefits of the Win32 API while eliminating a lot of the boilerplate code. Instead they went after Java with the .NET managed stuff, bloated and slow compared to the native API.

Qt is now the best "old school" UI framework by far.

Experimentation is a cost center?

>including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF

Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism.

Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.

Ultimately it still comes down to someone in the chain giving a damn. There are obvious, surface level bugs across most technologies. Yet, developers, PMs, VPs all sign off and say, "Close enough".

Does Satya Nadella even use a windows laptop?

It's not such a difficult task to set up hyprland. And niri doesn't even need to be configured, the default configuration performs all the required tasks.

Yeah but how much faster is hardware since then? M.2 SSDs, lots more GHz + cores, fast GPUs, etc. Everything is way faster and should more than make up for those security checks IMO.

It's more like shortcuts to install things like Candy Crush.

And I've seen that.

But Windows is made for the big masses. It's definitely a good thing that Microsoft forces Auto-Updates, because otherwise 95% of people would run around with devices that have gaping security holes. And 90% of these people are not being a firewall 100% of their time.

Side effect unfortunately is that they are shoving ad- and bloatware down your throat through these updates.

But that is, because Microsoft does not care about the end user at all. It's not the fault of auto-updates.

They fixed it recently: https://www.techpowerup.com/342538/windows-11-finally-fixes-...

It really depends on what you play. I've been playing online co-op regularly with a bunch of friends since Covid times. We're jumping to new (well, on sale) games regularly, and the only recent time I booted to Windows was because a 4-player mod for Remnant II _might_ not work on Linux. Can't remember the previous game that did not work on Linux. I'm so used to things working without major tinkering that I forget to check protondb most of the time.

So if you don't play popular multiplayer games you're a recluse?

Plenty of people play single player games, and simply socialize outside of games...

I actually don't like to play with random people on the internet.

I prefer the comfort of knowing them, and usually do it in the old basement LAN party way.

In my young time we didn't have internet, and we were actually LESS recluse overall ;-)

I play Helldivers 2 on Linux, and there are TONS of people playing.

Let's not even go there. Copilot is .. just bad. I'm not surprised though.

FYI, nearly all of that UI/app garbage can be removed (or re-enabled like the Start/context menu) in <5 minutes with:

https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

It persists across updates, can be customized with extremely granular control over what is removed/re-enabled, or using the default mode which works fantastically for most users with minimal risk of disabling something many people might prefer to keep (e.g Xbox app).

I’ve been using it for years on every machine/VM with Windows 11 installed. The OS gets out of my way completely both in terms of functionality and distractions like ads.

I cannot recommend it enough, I am eternally grateful to the maintainers for making Windows 11 feel like a modernized Windows 7 experience.

Forcing OneDrive :/

Most of it are turned off or possible to turn off in LTSC IoT version, which is only Win version reasonable to use without beenig annoyed when using it.

This list really needs proofreading.

>- BitLocker device encryption tied to MS account

Unless something changed with 11, this is opt in, with a specific "save to your microsoft account option". I really don't see the issue here.

>- Hardware attestation

This is either a rehash of the "TPM 2.0 requirement" point above, or just outright false.

>- Telemetry/Data Collection

>- Extensive diagnostic data collection

This are the same thing restated

>- Forced automatic updates

>- Limited update deferral for Home users

Again, these are just the same thing.

>- Feature updates bundled with security updates

That's basically... every commercial OS out there? Good luck getting security updates on android (if your OEM even provides it) if you're not on the latest version. Some linux distros even have it as a selling point, aka. rolling release.

>- Device Management (Enterprise)

>- Intune/MDM integration

These are the same thing AND you have to jump through hoops to enable it. I really don't see the issue here.

>- Copilot integration

>- Windows Autopilot

You can just... not use it?

>- Azure AD requirements

???

Is this just restating the microsoft account requirement?

>Monetization

This is a restatement for half the other points.

>- Start menu ads/recommendations Update Control

>- Ads in Start menu

>- Suggested apps

>- Pre-installed third-party apps (Candy Crush, etc.)

All stating the same thing.

FYI you can change the taskbar alignment.

Zone94 is still releasing modern Windows XP distributions and OneCore API brings Windows 10-level app support to Windows XP.

https://github.com/shorthorn-project/One-Core-API-Binaries

Link to this fridge? Just so I know which one to avoid you know

Non power users just want a desktop with a browser shortcut, and maybe office apps. I extended the life of a laptop many years for my aging non technical parents. I even encrypted the hard drive for them and since Microsoft basically committed security malpractice by not making encryption available to Home edition users it was significantly more secure. After a 5 minute explainer they never once asked me a single question about it.

Still, complaining about something you can only possibly see when you're not using the computer is such a minor thing, whether you like it or not, I cant find myself to care in any amount.

I was wondering what I want for my background but you've nailed it. Just random animals in nature.

This really made me laugh, thanks.

Honestly that sounds like something I would set as my work background just as a gag though.

My last Windows PC shipped from the vendor with all the tiles and ads and live updates already disabled. I don't know why I see so many other people struggling with turning them off on here.

Back when people customized screensavers, you would put the .scr file (a regular exe) in the Windows directory, and it would populate the list of screen savers? I'm guessing that's no longer a thing in the name of security theater.

Yeah, it's one of the reasons I use a Microsoft account to collect the PC entitlements and then create a local user account that has a sane profile name and never touch the online account again.

I totally agree with you, just yesterday I edited a document in Microsoft word and opened the second document for comparison. Suddenly, the first document froze and when I closed the program, I did not see the changes that I had made before. After complaining about my life, I started anew, and only the next time I downloaded Word offered me a recovery option.

Man, I've been an Apple user for years, and the best rumor I've ever heard is that MacOS 27 is going to be a Snow Leopard (bug fix) release!

It's so buggy on 26, it drives me crazy. Just not nearly as crazy as Windows 11 drives me.

> Office on the Mac is far, far more stable, easy to use, and considerably faster than on Win11

I haven't had stability issues with any Office program in years, but everything you mentioned is moot because there are Office features (especially Power___ features in Excel) that don't have parity on MacOS. If I get a workbook from a client, I need it to run exactly the same on my machine as it does on theirs.

I've had a good multi monitor experience in Pop!_OS with the COSMIC desktop. Not sure exactly how it compares to other desktop environments though.

The first time I’ve had my multi-monitor setup(s) “just work” on Linux is recently installing Fedora 43 on my Ideapad. (After becoming exhausted trying to tweak Linux Mint to get tolerable sizing across all the screens).

Wayland per-monitor fractional scaling is delightful and after a couple gsettings tweaks restoring minimize/bottom dock I’ve been loving the polish and snappiness of Gnome. I also had to switch the WiFi backend from wpa_supplicant to iwn due to connection problems on one specific WiFi network but now it’s totally stable.

macOS multi-monitor support and scaling is a constant thorn in my side that was marginally improved by paying for Better Display. Windows 11 really is the most solid option for various monitor combinations not in Apple's happy path of resolutions/sizes.

But I don’t really like the ergonomics of using even clean de-bloated Windows as my main dev machine, so was very pleased to have such a great out-of-the-box experience trying Fedora for the first time.

No, they’ll be using a W11 on an old laptop provided by IT

The Chris Titus utility has worked very well for me. I used it to de-bloat Win 11 after I upgraded the OS last year.

I run Win 11 on an old tiny NUC PC that has Windows 10 before - now it does seem faster, is very stable and is not so annoying.

One thing: AFAIK you need to have the Windows 11 Pro version for the best de-bloating results.

I say go one step further and learn to fish harder and don't use any of these scripts. I can't even imagine trying to debug an issue on my machine after running one of these "makes arbitrary changes" scripts.

Do it all manually if for no other reason than you know all the changes you made and know where all the different settings actually are.

Having fished I have found the fish hard to catch so thought I would ask from another fisher.

I tried this when Win 7 was new, and it worked great. Then I tried it when Win 10 was new, and it was a complete useless waste of time. In a week it was too slow to use again.

I still haven't used Windows since Win 10 support ended, and have no idea how bad Windows 11 is for people to declare Win 10 "super fast" all over the internet. But I don't have any hope it will accept any setup I want. Win 10 already didn't.

I believe it does, but only from a clean install, rather than an in-place upgrade; I ran into this a few years ago.

Incredible you could run it in 2005 since it was released in late 2006. I ran windows vista beta that summer on my new 2GB computer, it was a great OS in my view.

Form an LLC and present yourself as a small business interested in IoT.