Crap like this makes my Linux desktop (Gnome on Ubuntu) feel nice in comparison. As the mainstream players have added more bloat/ads/etc (e.g. ads in the start menu) over the last N years, and the Linux desktop has gotten more mature, it really does just feel simple & smooth in comparison.
Not suggesting Linux is for everyone, but if you happen to use it or are thinking about it, it's nice.
It's amazing to me that Mac and Windows don't really feel (from UX standpoint) that much faster or smoother than 10 years ago despite hardware being much more powerful. Computers get faster but software keeps operating on the "edge" by adding more complexity. Linux is nice, but it would be nicer to have a UX focused product that keeps it simple and takes advantage of fast hardware instead of seeing it as an opportunity to load it with more complexity for seemingly no benefit.
The main problem is Mac's windows management. I'm having good success with the new stage manager feature along with "reduced motion" enabled, and some hotkeys to activate apps. This gives me near-instant transitions, which I really love about many Linux window managers. (Like Sway.)
This with M1 is the smoothest UX I've ever had, even compared to my powerful Windows computer. While Linux and SwayWM did feel a bit more snappy, the other part of the UX was lacking enough that I spent too much time tweaking and not enough time getting shit done.
They don’t feel faster than a decade ago and they feel significantly slower than two decades ago. There has to be some “law” name for how software expands to consume any increased resources.
It's amazing to me how many glaringly obvious issues Windows 10 still has. Recently I had to leave the comfort of my PopOS! desktop and use a brand-new Windows 10 gaming laptop.
Windows + "putty" would regularly lose keystrokes at the beginning of the word. And for whatever reason, typing "putty" would not select "putty" as the top choice, but "puttygen".
And then I wrote a text in Notepad where I had to paste in some information. Ctrl+V and started typing. Boy was I surprised that the paste command was delayed and pasted halfway into the next word.
Like WTF Microsoft? You have 4 CPU cores boosting to 4+ GHz and you can't keep up with my typing speed in the core UI of your OS? Is this thing dedicated entirely to vision-impaired retirees?
I had a 2019 Macbook and it felt like an unbearably slow piece of crap that constantly had the spinning ball and fans blasting full speed doing just about nothing. Now my 2020 M1 feels extremely snappy. Everything is instant now.
GNOME is garbage made by people who really really wish they were working on tablet UIs but weren't good enough to work for Apple or Google. They repeatedly show disdain for the user base and their product is nigh unusable without extensions they provide no guarantee will continue working version to version.
I guess it doesn't work for you. I have no problems with it. In fact, I vastly prefer it to both Windows and OSX.
For me, I like the simplicity. I don't need any extensions. I don't have to hunt around for settings in ten different places with different user interfaces (windows, I'm looking at you). I have never got on with the window management in OSX, but some clearly prefer it.
I guess KDE is what people who want everything to be customisable out of the box should use, but I haven't tried that in years.
I disagree. I have been using Kubuntu and Fedora at work.
Fedora supposedly is amazing because always ahead, and I would, except that I'm terrified of upgrading because every time I do, gnome breaks plugins.
Gnome without plugins is not usable from my perspective (system tray), which essentially managed to create this horrible situation where I have to delay upgrading for 6 months to be on the safe side.
Kubuntu on the other side, is ubuntu. Canonical messed up badly with Pro, so I'm looking for alternatives.
That's when I realized that my only problem with Fedora IS GNOME.
Next time, I'm sticking to KDE, I don't care what the most common one is, KDE seems to be more stable and that's important to me.
And the window manager is way more flexibility for heavy multidesktop users...
I don't suggest Linux to anyone who can't set it up themselves now. Every time I set someone up with Ubuntu or something, they don't realize you have to manually update it so everything is 4 years out of date and the upgrade process doesn't even work anymore so you have to do a full install again.
Windows is built for the average person who just needs their computer to manage itself. The average Windows or macOS user wants the system to prompt regularly and for the "yes" button to just make it work.
This is why you show them. I did. And they were fine with doing it.
But if someone is like my brain damaged sister (who drinks their lives away) and is incapable of grasping any information, I make a simple script with just a single command (that I put in a folder called 'scripts' under root) to run at a specific time in the background to do the updating (Typically during hours of non use). The only time it really has to be rebooted is when a new kernel is installed. Well, I let the user take care of that whenever they reboot, or shutdown their machine.
In fact, to make life easier, that is what I do for all of my household computers so that I don't have to think about it (because I am lazy).
Don’t know. Presumably the Ubuntu prompts were not as aggressive as the MS ones so the person just closed the window. While my grandma will just end up on Windows 11 without even knowing how which is exactly the “just works, can’t mess it up” setup these types of users need.
Exactly. With Linux, the user has to actually click on the update icon, click a button to start the updates, then type in their password.
For most users, that's just *way* too hard to do, so it never gets done.
With Windows, it'll force updates on you at some point, so Grandma will be updated whether she wants to or not, even if she's in the middle of something. Users like that *need* this.
And these days MS and Apple are pretty good at making the process pretty transparent. I don't remember ever updating my Apple Watch, it's just up to date. Presumably updated over night, Windows is mostly the same.
Right, but still you have to click somewhere and type in a password IIRC.
That's *way* too hard for many users. If it isn't done completely invisibly in the background, or completely forced on the user, then it just won't get done.
We lost a lot of competence along the years.
Are people trying to get back into Womb state? I mean it's not just computers but everything.
On the other hand we have highly competent people who are unwilling to put in "the work" if someone does a half assed job for them. Even if they know they can do better with little more effort.
And then there are these ultra dedicated people who do everything to be independent from others to the point of social isolation.
I think you raise some good points, as I've noticed that it seems like average people, decades ago, used to be a lot more capable of handling various things that today it seems like they're not. I think personally it was because, back then, they were basically forced into it, or just didn't have so many things distracting them.
Still, when Grandma won't update her computer because clicking a few buttons and typing a password is too much work, we can't point to the past here: she wasn't updating computers in her younger years either, and usually wasn't using a computer at all. Even middle-aged people now are using computers and smartphones, when in their younger years they didn't have those things.
No ordinary people are competent enough, even for Linux these days. The tech people tend to over-exaggerate their belief that average people can't think beyond hitting a button.
I've had trouble with sound, wireless (both wifi and bluetooth), graphics, boot, and power-state management with Linux, with at least one of these issues appearing in every single device I've installed Linux on, with none of those appearing on the Windows devices that I've also used.
I also have experienced performance, usability, and integration problems with every Linux desktop environment that I've used.
Linux desktops are certainly not "nicer period". They're better than Windows and macOS along certain axes (e.g. transparency and modularity of internals) and worse along others.
> I've had trouble with sound, wireless (both wifi and bluetooth), graphics, boot, and power-state management with Linux,
Hah! I could say the same for Windows! I'm the family IT support person and I've experienced all those problems and a whole lot more in Windows. Especially after Windows upgrades (e.g. going from Windows 7 to 10 or 10 to 11).
At least with Linux there's always a way to fix it. It might be in some obscure StackOverflow post or the Ubuntu forums or the Arch wiki (which is fantastic BTW) but there's always a solution.
With Windows there often isn't a solution other than, "wait for the vendor to fix it." There's not even good troubleshooting options in Windows because the built-in logger is the worst in all of the history of computing and I don't know how anyone can put up with it!
There isn’t always a solution on Linux. I’ve hit a few things over the years where I’ve hit a wall and got stuck. On two occasions I fixed it myself and submitted patches and got entirely ignored. The bot closing your ancient PR that the maintainer of a large open source project didn’t even bother looking at is the status quo in my existence.
Now I acknowledge that I’m helpless on any platform.
Every time I hang up a phone or video call on my bluetooth headphones, Apple Music opens on my mac and starts playing House Of The Rising Sun. I’ve just come to accept this now because there really is no way to stop it.
I expect that at some point in the future Asahi linux will be mature enough and someone will have finally figured out how to support the trackpad properly so we really can enjoy Linux on Apple’s incredible hardware.
Then I’ll have some kind of awakening where I realise it’s not normal for The Animals to play an outro to every meeting, and well… it’ll be goodbye macos my old friend of 20 years.
Thank you for corroborating this, every time I bring it up on HN people ignore it like it's a non-issue. My headphones should not be a shortcut for launching Apple Music; that is a terrible default setting.
> someone will have finally figured out how to support the trackpad properly
We're there, if you use Wayland. In Firefox I have pinch-to-zoom, forward/backwards swipe shortcuts and KDE has 1:1 desktop navigation gestures. I'm using a wired Magic Trackpad, but I'm sure the behavior is the same on all of Apple's trackpads. Give it a whirl this weekend, if you've got the stuff lying around!
I've been quite enjoying macOS. It's a different paradigm for sure, but as I get more fluent in it I find I enjoy it almost as much as my linux desktop. Windows still feels like I'm waging war against Microsoft for control of my computer, though.
It's frustrating how easily Microsoft is annoying users purely because they have to have every single pixel monetized on Windows. So much user frustration comes down to this. A potentially useful widget feature if it was open to Windows app developers first, is just another avenue to throw MSN News and ads at you, becoming yet another thing to fight your computer about.
Do you mean like the "system restart required - in 60s" style of the other OSes, or just in order to boot with the newly-installed kernel? The only you-must-reboot-now-no-choice thing I can think of any of my Linux desktops is nvidia driver updates, I guess because you're living on borrowed time without a reboot...
It's all the little conveniences like that in desktop oriented Linux-based operating systems (which directly correspond to opposing "paper-cuts" in Windows and often MacOS) which have kept me on Linux for a couple few decades now (last Windows I used regularly was Windows 7). It was rough going at first, as Linux distros weren't nearly as "polished" back then as they mostly are now, but it was worth it because Linux simply kept improving in every little detail that mattered to me. Every time I'm forced to touch Windows these days, it's positively painful trying to navigate even the most basic functions.
Branding alone gets me. Booting up MacOS or Windows just feels wrong, nevermind the time I spend uninstalling their bloatware or disabling the ads. A fresh Linux system is unparalleled zen, as long as you coughed up the money for a properly supported machine.
In response to what? All three operating systems here have things they are uniquely capable of, and uniquely incapable of. The stones are all in glass houses, I dare someone to throw the first one.
This is a really weak retort. Only with linux is buying hardware a minefield where it's common to blame the purchaser for "not doing the research" or knowing what chipset(!) is in some piece of consumer hardware. Meanwhile, this problem simply doesn't exist on the two main desktop competitors.
It's been this way for 30 years.
And yes, this counts for "fully supported" hardware.
Is the whole suspend/hibernate ("Modern Standby") clusterfuck not real enough of an issue for you? Seems like that fits pretty well into the category of problem you're describing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952
Let's see: in the last couple of years, my Linux laptops have made me... spend a few minutes googling for how to get systemd to leave dhcp-provided dns servers alone, and one time where I couldn't get a serial driver to install cleanly. Meanwhile, my (work) Windows laptops have tried to burn down my house.
I disagree. I've tried Linux on the desktop over and over and over again from about 1997 and there's just problems with it all over the place. I have used it on the server for the same period. The desktop environment for a start has been incredibly volatile, the kernel maturity is just not there and honestly most of the commercial apps out there which are Windows or macOS only aren't available on Linux. Also sometimes updates break things terribly. To this day many people dread closing their laptop lids or running apt-update on non debian distros.
Ergo I stuck with Windows and used Linux in VMs when required. Then I dived out back into macOS about 3 years ago. This was just expensive, volatile and obtuse. If you stay within the rails it just works though and I'll give them their due; the hardware, particularly ARM is top notch. But again some stuff I need to do just doesn't work well on it and it's very pay to play. I feel a little exhausted if I'm honest after riding the rollercoaster on that.
So now, here I am with an ass end desktop PC again running windows 11 pro and it really does just work fine. I got one annoying notification which was gpedit'ed out and it's been wonderful so far with no further eye pokings. I don't get ads thrown at me. It keeps out of the way. There was one hardware issue which was fixed by replacing an HDMI cable with a DisplayPort cable. It's absolutely boring which is how I like things. If something does go wrong, a thousand people will have had the same issue, so I can fix it with Google in 10 minutes.
Edit: I feel dirty giving Microsoft some credit here.
Edit 2: notable commercial apps I use: Photoshop (sorry gimp doesn't cut it), Lightroom (and no darktable doesn't cut it) and Excel (libreoffice nope). I also have a Lenovo T495s Ryzen here running Ubuntu that hangs after 2-3 minutes on the desktop consistently.
I’m saying that everyone shouts switch to Linux but this isn’t an option for a lot of people and isn’t even likely the best solution for most. Most of the commercial apps have no viable alternatives on Linux or the open source market gap fillers are vastly inferior.
They're as true today as ever. On a modern desktop, using GNOME, everything still randomly breaks.
Randomly (maybe when Gnome is upgraded) most of my plugins break and leave everything in a bad state.
There was the time when ArcMenu broke and left me with no launcher or way to get to anything short of finding my way to a terminal and blowing away my config.
There was the time that Dash to Panel was retired and replaced with the same code but in a new location.
There's the fact that most usable window managers don't support enough zones to snap windows or keyboard shortcuts to do so, and that if you mention this everyone will tell you to use a tiling window manager and act like you're "not a real engineer" for using anything else.
There's the fact that all Linux window managers forget that multiple monitors exist. WMs with launchers will have launchers only on one monitor. Using i3 on multiple monitors is endless pain.
There's the fact that there are a million Linux package managers, they're all feuding with each other, and software developers who care about users more than political infighting have largely given up. Updating Discord on Linux is a nightmare; if I don't use my Linux laptop for a month or two even Google Chrome will be stuck in a state where I have to manually download and reinstall a new package.
I started using Linux in 1997 with Red Hat 5.2. I've used it throughout my career, and 26 years later it's still not ready for every day desktop/laptop use.
That almost sounds like bad hardware that Windows is somehow not using, or working around in a hacky way. I am literally typing this on a T495s with 22.04 LTS and no freeze, nothing. Uptime thanks to suspend is creeping along at something like 30 days.
My daughter’s one does the same for ref. Which CPU does yours have in it. Ours are both 3700U.
The issue is related to Radeon and power management. That’s as far as I got with debugging before my crushed soul put windows back on it so I could get some shit done.
1. An operating system should only display something on the screen if it is in service of the user. This is in service to Microsoft, and a full screen display.
2. The two 'yes' buttons shows Microsoft is really shaky on the concept of consent.
Why is Microsoft pushing Windows 11 so strongly? Is there an economic advantage for them to have a user on W11 instead of W10? I haven't owned or dailyed a Windows computer since before Windows 8 was released, this question comes from a place of curiosity as an outsider.
They do the same with Edge, I never understood why they care so much if people use their chromium fork instead of the normal one.
At the same time they're also making it user hostile with all the suggested offer crap so I'm sure it won't get much marketshare. Normally the idea is to wait with this hostile monetisation until you have the marketshare lol.
I have to use it at work though because MS lobbied heavily to make it the standard browser there
>I never understood why they care so much if people use their chromium fork instead of the normal one.
Microsoft controls the default homepage of Edge. The homepage which most certainly receives millions of daily views owing to how few people change defaults.
They make (made?) stores pay a license fee for each machine sold, and Windows 11 won't run as well on older hardware therefore prompting people to buy new machines.
Cookie pop-ups became so prevalent and full of dark patterns that I consider surfing the web highly unpleasant without appropriate technical countermeasures. (e.g. "I don't care about cookies" extension).
Unfortunately I haven't found a blocker for the recurring nag screens from Microsoft asking me to switch from a local account to a Microsoft account to log into Windows.
Yes! Yes we can, we have fabulous Windows Subsystem for Linux and we hang out with the OpenAI chaps.
I'll rant. MS can go to the ninth hell with Zuck and Larry Page et al for all I care, the only part I cannot swallow is Bill Gates now wants to play the good old man. Everything MS does today is exactly as he would always have done it. I'm sorry bill but the precedent immoral fools like you and jobs set is worth more shit and shame (and damage to culture) than your old age could ever make up for, you're a disgrace unto this world and may the memory of these men rot in a dungeon up to par with their ethical hygiene. I hope this is the year of linux on the desktop.
I would suggest that those are better targets for hatred than tech companies. I am not saying that it is only possible to hate one thing at a time, nor am I saying that hatred is a healthy emotion, I am simply making some suggestions.
Of course, whether any particular group or individual is a better target of hatred than another is subjective, but I tried forwarding some groups which seem quite universally reviled.
I'm simply making the suggestion that "Hey guys, you shouldn't hate $currenttopic, you should hate $completelyunrelated" contributes nothing to any discussion in which it's uttered. Nobody wants to hear it regardless of agreeing or not, because it's a transparent attempt to draw the conversation off-topic.
Why don't they finish actually implementing W11, give it a consistent UI standard and stop investing all their energy in trying to monitor and monetize their already paying users? Maybe then, people will upgrade.
Part of the problem is that many “paying users” haven’t paid for a long time. Windows 11 is a free upgrade, which of course means that Microsoft is finding new and creative ways to extract a profit.
I’d personally rather pay for extremely high quality OS updates, but I know from personal experience that most people don’t care enough to pay. They’d stick with the old OS until they have to buy a new computer, which could be 5+ years.
So for Microsoft, they either have to support large amounts of users on old OS versions or make the upgrades free. Unless Microsoft can start making large profits on the hardware like Apple does, this is really the only business model that makes sense.
Yes, it is way more profitable. Just look at the mobile gaming market for an example of ads and scammy in-app purchases taken to the extreme.
People expect mobile games to be “free”, even though console and PC games typically cost $20-$60. Good luck finding consumers to pay even $20 for a mobile game, much less $60.
Similarly, good luck finding consumers to pay $500 an OS upgrade now that they think it should be “free”.
I run Windows 98 on my WIP retro computer. I recently got into the habit of dual booting OpenBSD so I can rsync C:\WINDOWS to another partition, and rsync it back when it inevitably becomes unbootable as I test things out. This was a golden moment for me as I was no longer installing a fresh copy 3x per day.
More on-topic: Windows 98 is not only nostalgic but it also represents a past time when we were more in control of our PCs, and understanding them fully was a less daunting task.
I kind of wonder what happens if you put a Windows 3.11 complete with Trumpet WinSock on the unprotected internet these days. I wonder if it’s immune because there’s all the malware has evolved past its exploits.
Watch there be some retro computing enthusiast (unintentionally?) running Back Orifice out there. Like a shadow ecosystem of archaic malware.
Everything since 7's been a downgrade. And really, if they'd just patched a very small set of 7 features into XP (mostly driver management improvements), I'd prefer that.
I wouldn't touch 8, but I rather like 10, and I'll stick with that until 12. Windows has a long tradition where whenever there's a good version, the next version sucks and vice-versa. Sort of the "tick-flop" model of software releases.
Get with the times. Windows 2000 Professional is the ticket. Even 2003 Server and 2008 server (IIRC) could practically be run as bloatless versions of their corresponding desktop versions, with way less fiddling.
If I really had to be running a Windows desktop today the first thing I'd do is look if there's a viable server edition. Wikipedia tells me that Server 2022 will be supported until 2031.
Not that I foresee having to do that anytime soon but would still be curious to hear if people are still doing this and if it's still the way to go.
"Fortunately, there are many ways to prevent such banners from infecting your computer. One could give Microsoft a taste of its own medicine by disabling TPM to render the computer "incompatible" with Windows 11 (this potentially increases security risks, so proceed only if you are 100% sure turning off TPM will not break anything on your system). Also, paying attention and reading what your computer tries to say, regardless of how vague the descriptions are, dramatically reduces the chances of getting unplanned upgrades"
Yes, if you have Bitlocker with hardware-backed encryption active and you clear out the TPM you will not be able to unlock that disk in the worst case.
And don't make the mistake of thinking, oh, if I don't have Windows 11 Pro, I don't have BitLocker.
Windows has been rolling out, on some processors and configurations, a feature called "Device Encryption." Which is basically BitLocker except it is on by default, included in Windows 11 Home, and escrows a copy of your key to your Microsoft Account (which makes the MSA requirement for "more security" make a little more sense)...
I also remember having some minor hiccups related to network credentials and Windows Hello when I disabled the TPM to prevent any "accidental" W11 upgrade.
I mean, there is an option to stay on Windows 10 but man... Microsoft, really scraping the bottom of the barrel with that move.
Though with only 18% of Windows users on Windows 11, and Windows 10 going EOL in 2 years supposedly... maybe they are that desperate. Having to extend Windows 10's service life would be humiliating.
All you people who thought that Micro$oft in the Satya Nidella era had become a kinder, gentler company, this is proof positive that the tiger doesn't change its stripes.
(now looking for a good alternative to the Atom text editor because I refuse to use VSCode)
Or SSH remote development, or C++, or C#, or Pyright... Microsoft is big on "embrace, extend, extinguish" by releasing proprietary extensions that only run on proprietary VS Code binaries, and detect and refuse to operate on open-source builds.
I was really hoping they would stick to their "window 10 is the last windows" rolling release idea. They could've avoided this whole thing this way. (It could be still bad for the users though...)
I think they probably wanted the big yearly announcement posts that Android, iOS and macOS get. You don't get people whinging about having to update any other OS, which is funny because Windows tends to break stuff the least out of any of them.
Perhaps if MS started releasing a numbered windows every year people would be less resistant to installing it.
> You don't get people whinging about having to update any other OS
I think you just missed them. iOS gets constant issues - at least they stopped breaking the alarm clock. Each MacOS is a "what will I have to debug for a day this time" experience. Linux depends on a distribution, but Ubuntu at least is trying hard to join the release-breaking group.
The only one I personally never complained about is Android. (I'm sure others have...)
There have been stats posted showing almost all iOS users run the latest version at any moment, so there clearly isn't the same kind of fear of updating that Windows users have had.
Windows users are afraid to upgrade because Microsoft generally tends to change things. When Apple actually makes breaking changes to their OS (see: Catalina, Big Sur, et. al) people are deathly afraid of upgrading their Mac. At least I've learned to fear it, after installing Catalina and watching half my apps break upon reboot.
Ehh I am pretty sure that every "last, final, pinky promise" deadline for Windows end of support has been extended multiple times. I believe Win7 support was finally scheduled to end 2023-January (as in today).
I used to be annoyed about this until I experienced the tail end of Windows XP and Windows 7 in the financial services market. I've seen things that would make any sysadmin out there cry. I mean I'm still annoyed yet as a power user but I see why they do it.
> Many users are likely to click the first highlighted button without reading the message
Honestly, these are most likely the people who would benefit most from being dragged kicking and screaming into updating, lest they fall victim to randomware.
I don't know how people can use their computers at all given the BS Microsoft does these days. Like, why do people put up with this if they really don't have to and could just use Linux? I mean, even Valve chose Linux over Windows for the Steam Deck.
I have never seen this screen. Why don't you just click the "Keep Windows 10" button? But TBH, I wish the same from many other projects. Update python 2->3 was really painful for the whole community. Same for cjs->esm. I am pretty sure both would have been much faster and less painful if it was a hard switch.
If your computer isn't compatible with Windows 11 (your CPU/motherboard not having a TPM probably being the main reason) then you won't see the upgrade prompt.
I haven’t seen that screen either on multiple computers running Win 10, all of them with a TPM. Likely reason is that I’m running the pro and enterprise versions respectively which puts me in a different customer bucket.
I'm always surprised to see so many complaints about it here, where I would expect most of the audience is somewhat tech literate and could easily configure it the way they want in a matter of minutes.
No, they shouldn't. They can make more profit by treating customers badly, and profit and shareholder value are the only things that matter, so that's what they should do.
If consumers don't like this, then they should find alternatives. Microsoft treating consumers badly is nothing new.
I booted Windows the other day and was greeted with an unskippable screen advertising a bunch of stuff I don't need like an Office 365 subscription, OneDrive, connecting my phone, switching my default browser to Edge...
The only way to get past it is to hit Continue and click through like six ads one by one, finding the hidden skip button on each ad. All this under the guise of "let us help you get more out of Windows!" as if they were not forcing me to run a gauntlet of ads before being able to use my computer. Talk about dark patterns. This is not even the first time it's happened on this machine.
I already use a Mac for work, so maybe it really is time to let go of my Windows-only PC games, install Linux, and escape Microsoft's orbit.
I waited for a long time to upgrade to win11 due to issues. A start menu and task bar replacement fixed my biggest issue. WSL2 is awesome compared to WSL1. I dont care for the animations are either on/off, because I hate the zoom out animation when turning on my 2nd monitor. Other than that, stuff works now and seems to work rather nicely. Also, font rendering is nicer.
I really preferred WSL1 because it was lower overhead and more integrated. It was really like managing Windows through gnu tools. WSL2 is just a VM and I don't care about kernel compatibility.
I upgraded to Windows 11 on purpose, I don't quite understand the complaints about it. You need TPM 2 and Secure Boot anyway for security (no, password-based encryption is not secure).
How is password based encryption not secure? The hardware based encryption used on windows and macos doesn't seem to really do anything and is always used in combination with password based encryption. Seems to be more of a "it's free to add so why not, and it might be useful to stop brute force cracking the password"
I think anyone who uses win 10 cares. Win 11 is shitshow. Tried it on my gaming machine a few months ago because I was curious.
The best thing about it was the ability to revert to Win 10. It was time limited - you could only do this within 1 week after the "upgrade". I explicitly paid money to Microsoft for a Win 10 license to be treated like this.
what was a shit show? I only have one windows machine with 10 on it and it's not compatible with windows 11, but I'll probably have to replace it as it's about 8 years old (but with relatively new drive and maxed out memory)
- In general, most things are implemented with even worse design and UX/UI taste than before. Example: Drop-down/context menus have these dead zones between every row, a few pixels tall, for no particular reason where no row is highlighted. That particular thing was driving me up the wall. It just makes no sense.
Not suggesting Linux is for everyone, but if you happen to use it or are thinking about it, it's nice.