I’m a lifelong Windows user. I was using DOS and Windows 3.1 back in the 90’s. I learned how to set up and manage windows servers in college. I manage an active directory domain at work.
I did not like Windows 8 or 10. I think removing the start menu was stupid. Changing the right-click context menu was even more stupid. It seems every iteration of Windows up until Windows 7 focused on adding new features and improving the UI, where as every iteration after has stripped features away and made the UI worse.
Windows 11 was the last straw. I built a new PC earlier this year and run Nobara Linux on it. It’s not perfect, but it’s been fantastic and it works much better than Windows 10 or 11. Thanks to AI chatbots like Gemini I’ve been able to get help when it comes to learning terminal commands and configuring my OS just the way I want it. It plays all my games from Steam, GOG, itch.io, and even my ROM library. I’ve even been able to install Amethyst mod manager to install mods for Elder Scrolls Oblivion, which has been great fun. Amethyst also supports other Bethesda titles like Skyrim, Fallout, and Starfield. I’m very happy with it. It feels like I haven’t had to sacrifice anything. All my games work, but now I have total control over my UI, when my OS installs updates, and I have privacy again. No tracking BS reporting back to Microsoft.
Also at work we used to have over a thousand windows workstations. We’ve been switching our users over to chromebooks and now there are less than 100 windows workstations in our domain. Microsoft has lost me as a home customer, and over 90% of our business customers. I think they’ve shot themselves in the foot because I don’t see how cloud computing is going to carry them for much longer. I think almost half of microsoft’s cloud runs office 365 and onedrive, which home and office users don’t actually need. Libre Office exists and people can use dropbox instead, if they even need it. Many people can just use a USB drive like the old days. Microsoft Azure makes up just over half of microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, and a significant portion of their azure market is running AI clusters. I do think there is an AI bubble, and that won’t continue for long either.
I think Microsoft is going to have a comeuppance, and it will be well deserved. They brought this upon themselves.
The best joke is when you install Edge on your friends Linux computer when they are not looking and they lose their shit. Like a war vet when fireworks go off.
People still out here not locking their screens?
Installing programs without needing a password?
Flatpak
User level stuff wouldn’t ordinarily need a password
I don’t just automatically lock my screen unless there age little people around.
I lock my screen when I’m home alone.
Only reason I don’t is when my computer falls asleep the only way to wake it recently has been to reboot (pop OS)
Nvidia GPU? I have a similar problem on Bazzite, though mine never seems to enter proper suspend (fan lights still on etc.)
Yeah, looks like the latest dist upgrade actually fixed it for me. That or I just got lucky.
EDIT: wishful thinking
I haven’t worked in the office in ages but I was good about hitting Windows + L to lock when I got up.
Gotta teach em to lock their rig when they’re not using it somehow.
Though I’m still a fan of the ‘take a screen shot of the desktop and then remove the actual dekstop’ approach.
… hrm… it probably wouldn’t be that hard to make a version of ‘hollywood’ thats augmented by something like a cron job that just checks to see if its open or not, and reopens it if it isnt.
… the matrix has you …
In corporate environment, add Crowdstrike, Zscaler, windows instrumentation, and then some digital experience management solution to report on why apps are so slow, battery life is still only a few hours while it heats the room while sitting ‘idle’, or trying to render a file explorer window with 20 cores and 32 GB of RAM. Did I mention there are updates and you MUST REBOOT NOW, forget that you are presenting to a client.
Almost as offensive as Dell laptop keyboards on their corpo laptops. Ugh.
Sounds like your IT doesn’t know how to properly orchestrate updates.
Best way to do it in a Windows enterprise environment that I’ve seen so far:
- 1 Week: Install in the background silently and finish when the machine reboots.
- After the week, 2 Days: Warn once that the machine will automatically reboot in 48 hours.
- 12 hours before forced reboot: Pop up a warning in the corner with the countdown before reboot. Options are reboot now or warn me again in X hours. If you dismiss it without selecting, it pops up again in an hour.
If your Windows machine hasn’t rebooted in a week and a half, of course you’re going to have performance issues. What, you expect devs to avoid memory leaks?
That all said, the amount of Windows sysadmins who haven’t entirely given up on wrestling Microsoft’s update bullshittery is shrinking every day.
It is about reasonable defaults. Why would anyone want to stop their presentation for Windows update reboot? It should be much more friendly how it handles this. Like always check what the user is doing and when is a reasonable time to do it? Maybe at the end of the day.
Personally, I think they need to work on the whole concept. Make it as transparent as possible or less likely need a full reboot - containers or put more things in like wsl? Make the reboot only do reboot and not 20min installing updates… The user cant even chat on teams or browse the web while waiting. Think if it worked like like live cd that Linux can do.
Oh 100%.
Microsoft claimed ages ago when they made updates effectively mandatory (you can turn them off entirely or delay them by 27 day chunks forever on non-enterprise installs) that they would dynamically detect the times your computer wasn’t actively being used and try to target that, but it never really made a difference besides “aim for when the computer is likely powered off anyway”.
And that still doesn’t hit the basic “is the user presenting in PowerPoint, running a full screen video/program?” sort of common freaking sense stuff you’re talking about.
In some nicer news, Microsoft finally started trying to release some updates as “live updates” that don’t require a reboot late last year. So maybe in a decade they’ll get close to the Linux update experience.
My corpo windows laptop has 122 background processes running in task manager
Me at work every frickin day
Me too, fam :(
5pm signals the end of my working day serving capitalism, but also i can go back to using FOSS
Double relief
Besides solidworks, there isn’t anything I do that requires mf’ing windows. I could spin up a vm for solidworks. I hate it.
same. but no solidwork. Just oracle databases being migrated into MS fabric.
fuck, we hate oracle’s frying pan, so let’s jump into the nearest (slightly cheaper) fire.
Could be worse. This summer IT replaced all of our desktop mini PCs with Chromeboxes and ChromeOS. I don’t even have privileges. Any software I would want to install would have to come from google play store and requires admin level privileges. I normally download the desktop app to play Spotify on my computer, but can’t even do that. I can’t even change the fucking desktop background. The ONLY software freedom I have is chrome extensions and even that is a walled garden of Google’s making. Manifest v3 is going to make using my desktop nearly impossible compared to the freedom I have at home.
Honestly they could probably just take the damn thing out of my office at this point. I really only use it for documentation or continuing education so I could just use my personal laptop or go back to pen and paper for that. Anything else I would have done in my downtime at work can just wait until I get home.
I mean, my first 30 seconds of experiencing Windows 11 was watching a coworker wait for the file manager to open + render its toolbar, so I don’t think I could’ve really come to a different conclusion…
It’s the smell.
I am so pleased i got out of IT at the peak of Windows 7. I have seen all i want to see about 10 and 11. Hard pass from me.
i never really even got in, now i dont even want to anymore
Literally tried to install windows 11 for our office machines last week.
- installed
- extremely slow and laggy
- check process manager
- just takes 3.7GB to boot up
- Uninstall and install win10 IoT LTSC and debloat it immediately
unfortunately Linux isn’t yet an option because of microsoft office.
I have been managing with winboat for my office requirements.
Is there no hiccups? Because if I want to roll it out in our organization and switch to linux, I really need it to be perfect and fool proof (people that dont know what an OS is will be using it of course)
I’d say it works such that any mildly technically competent person can use it.
The problem is that I know The absolute surface level nature of most people’s technical ability.
The dual file system nature of winboat would probably cause you issues. All you have to do is save your work to the folder that you have shared between both os’s, but equally, I know full well the majority of computer users don’t know what a file or directory structure is.
I don’t expect the office apps to continue supporting ltsc tbh, so hopefully it lasts long enough for you.
Windows does aggressive caching now but will clear that if the memory is needed so I often find the in use value to not be as useful of an indicator now.
I will say if that was a 4gb machine I don’t expect it will run 11 that well, we now will only ok 16gb computers. Not just for windows, but chrome et al all have ridiculous memory usage now.
Interestingly, the web 365 apps seem to work on Linux Mint, but I’ve not used them extensively, or on another distro. I did a migration from Win10 to LM last autumn, and I was genuinely shocked to find that web Outlook and OneDrive work on Firefox on LM. Confirmed that web Excel and Word worked enough to allow display and editing of documents - not an extensive test, but definitely worth a look. Obviously, there are still differences between the web and desktop versions, but it might even be possible to run them under Wine, but I have not tried that, and woudn’t expect it to go too well tbh.
The web versions aren’t really professional enough for office usage afaik (and we don’t really “buy” microsoft products. And the web version doesn’t work that way afaik)
Everyone who uses O365 is pushed to use the web versions by the O365 ecosystem. When you click on Word/Excel/Outlook/whatever from your menu, it opens the web version; to use the locally installed app, you have to go to File/Open in Desktop or similar. The Open and Save dialogs default to using OneDrive - saving to local filesystem requires extra steps. The locally installed ones are becoming increasingly hard to use, by design, and the new features seem to be going into the web versions first and the local versions “eventually”. For example, the new excel “matrix” functions did not work in local excel the last time I tried to use them, though they might now, but there were a few features (special formatting I think) that only worked on the local version. Templates for word do not work on the web version.
We’re more than 125 000 employees globally using M$ Office 365. It’s cheaper, more secure, far superior for collaboration than the locally installed apps IMO. Works on and Linux distro with a JavaScript capable browser. Google suite is even better but the people calling the shots have a fetish for M$. Saying the web versions are not professional is odd. Maybe we just don’t share the definition of professional
You missed the part where we don’t buy microsoft products.
Yes, the office web apps all work fine inside of Firefox on Linux.
I use a debloated Win11 image for the situations I can’t get around it. Still much more resource intensive than Linux, but it’s something.
Windows has a lot more security than Linux (which lags). Every time Windows comes out with a new technology like secure boot, Linux users will scoff and down-play it until they catch up. And this happens with more than just security.
Also, Linux has way too many toolkits. If you want all the best apps; you need to add many whole toolkits which dramatically change the footprint. All new icons, dependencies, fonts, etc. Initial installs make a great first impression, and the rest is blamed on ‘your fault’, ‘pebkac’, ‘skill issue’. -Because it’s a religion.
I would love it if you back your claim “windows has lot more security than linux” with facts and evidence.
I would love it if LiGNUts could use a search engine. -But nah, they’ll wait hours and lean on others for an answer they could obtain in seconds. “cite your source” -Is the internet not at your fingertips?
You never learned how arguments work, huh? Here, let me help you.
Oh, so you know how to source something and still refuse to back your claim that Linux is more secure.
yeah, you made the claim that windows is more secure. the onus is on you to provide proof.
Windows security has alwaya been laughably bad, and usually just a scam to try to make it harder for users to use other operating systems.
Compared to what? You cannot honestly argue that Linux has better security. It’s not even a priority of Torvalds and he gets angry about too much security infringing on userspace. Everyone also knows BSD is more secure by default. We’re also talking just the kernel with Linux. Add all the ‘hobby’ type garbage that comes with DEs and you’re no longer using a kernel as your propaganda. Windows has improved vastly since the 90s when people just played mild pranks and no one was banking online.
Your brain lags
Also, me trying to use a mac.
He should be glitching and stuttering for the full Windows experience
I remember seeing a video about if the matrix was run on windows. it was hilarious
edit: found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX8yrOAjfKM
I was expecting this lesser-known classic instead: [YTP] The Matrix Runs On Windows Vista
It’s the smell!
This smelly smell…
There’s literally only one application I still need Windows for: EAC (Exact Audio Copy).
Everything else has a (often better) Linux alternative/version, runs in WINE or Proton, or can be used just fine in a virtual machine.
A good pdf editor is what I’m still looking to replace withiht having to deal with Wine. If PDFxchange made a proper Linux port, I’d buy a new license and migrate from windows.
Onenote is something id like a better replacement to because I hate it, but I haven’t found a replacement despite trying several of the options. PDFxchange could be my replacement for that though if it was ported.
Have you tried using LibreOffice Draw? It works pretty well for editing PDFs. Just make sure you have all of the fonts that the PDF uses before opening it.
I have. I forget why I didn’t care for it, but I’ve tried a couple times.
I am looking for a PDF editor which has support for digital signature. There are some which perform add a gpg signature, but clients want to see the green tick that Adobe provides. That’s why I have a internet-less Windows 7 VM having only Adobe Reader and Filezilla.
I use Trilium Notes as my OneNote replacement at home. I don’t use it religiously, but it’s helpful for basic stuff and seems pretty feature rich if you need that.
I primarily use it with a drawing tablet to annotate PDFs during meetings. I’ve been shifting towards just directly using PDFxchange for the purpose though since it makes it easier to send after meetings and I can directly edit the pdf still. It just pops up with annotation bubbles when trying to draw on top off existing drawings, so that’s an annoyance.
You could try rnote and xournalpp for PDF annotation. It works pretty well in my expeience for handwriting. I’d reccommend rnote over xournalpp since it can directly save to pdf (iirc), and you can also have an infinite canvas, so it would also be a good OneNote replacement in that department. For popup notes, inline text and stuff, okular from KDE works pretty well for me, but I have also heard good things about the GNOME pdf viewer (UI wise). Haven’t used the GNOME pdf viewer though, so can’t attest to features.
Have you tried ABCDE? It’s cli, but once you get used to it, it’s perfect for ripping AudioCDs in bulk.
Whipper is supposed to be (almost) as paranoid as EAC? Its been years, so my memory might be faulty.
I’ve been looking into this myself recently. EAC still seems to be the top option (followed by CUERipper/CUETools). CUETools itself runs under WINE, but CUERipper doesn’t (at least for me). Haven’t tried EAC on WINE yet.
https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Comparison_of_CD_rippers
I just use K3B to rip audio CDs. In particularly tricky places, I use cdparanoia and the FLAC encoder on command line. MusicBrainz Picard to fix the metadata. ffmpeg on command line to convert the FLAC albums to MP3 or other formats.
Finally got around to testing out EAC on WINE (prompted by my previous comment a few hours ago).
It seems to work without major issues on WINE 11 in a 32-bit prefix (at least on LMDE 7). Plugins need dotnet20 and dotnet48 installed, otherwise only the in-built AccurateRip meta engine shows up. I’ve only tested ripping to WAVE and FLAC, though.
In short, I’d say it’s worth a try now.
Are the rips and logs identical to Windows on the same machine?
Ironically I wasn’t able to get EAC working on my Windows 10 installation due to the WinFSP clash, whilst CUERipper errors out on WINE (something to do with how it interacts with the ODD).
However, CUETools works fine and so I was able to compare the same CD ripped by CUETools/CUERipper on Windows with EAC under WINE. I used an ABBA CD as the test case (100+ matches in CTDB, 10+ in AccurateRip).
The CUE sheets are functionally identical (barring the differences in extra metadata stored between the two, as CUERipper included the IRSC where EAC has a Composer comment instead) – the gaps and indices are all the same. The raw rip itself is also identical - I ripped the CD to a disc image (with offset correction in both cases) and the md5 checksum of the WAV file from both applications is the same.
In both tools the rip validated against AccurateRip and CUETools DB as well. I double-checked the EAC rip afterwards using CUETools (again under WINE), as a further test.
great info
thank you
Doesn’t it work under Wine too now?
It may, but I wouldn’t trust running it that way.
That means trusting Windows instead…
It’s pretty easy to constrain Windows 10 if all you need to run is EAC.
No thats 45 min. 30 sec is way before you finally get the usb to boot on the 3rd time flashing it. Then you find out you need to look up the latest hacky shit needed to make an offline account
Is there a loops app on f-droid yet?
Not yet
I have a real question here. Loops is on the fediverse. Can you not embed video from there, or is OP unwilling to do that for whatever reason?
Embed videos from where?
Lemmy doesn’t support video hosting. In the past I’ve used catbox.moe but had mixed results with video not uploading easily, users not being able to view them, and it just wasn’t great. So now since Loops is on ActivityPub I’ve been using them now.
I’m using Mlem which loads the videos automatically as part of the posts just like gifs. Just now thought to check Voyager, and it appears that it shows it as a link to be opened in the internal browser, so I’m guessing apps showing that behavior is probably why you’re asking.
I mean if I find a better alternative I’m all for it.
You can crosspost, but I don’t know how well lemmy interacts with it. It has major problems interacting with peertube and mastodon.
