Hate is a strong word, but I really really really don’t like Windows 11
45 points by abnercoimbre
45 points by abnercoimbre
There's a running joke that every other Windows release is pretty good. XP was good, Vista sucked, 7 was good, 8 sucked, 10 was good, 11 sucks. So I'm sticking around at least until 12 rolls around, in hopes that it'll keep the trend going.
Then again, Windows 11 just added new store ads to the startup search and there's no way to disable them with settings, registry hacks, or group policies. I don't have high hopes.
(The main thing keeping me on this OS is AutoHotKey, which doesn't have a competitive Linux analog)
The cottage industry that exists around Windows is incredible: "9 simple tweaks to get rid of ads on your Win11 box."
MS is damn lucky that a bunch of online multiplayer games have kernel-level anti-cheat that tightly couples them to Windows for now. If those didn't catch on, they'd be losing that crowd a lot faster.
Well, people put up with "9 simple tweaks to get rid of ads on your Win11 box" because they need 10 simple tweaks to make Linux run properly ;-)
I happened to build three computers last year: one Mac, one Linux, one Windows.
It wasn’t even close. Mac was easiest, but Lunux was hot on its heels, and both took about a half hour for OS setup. Windows 11 setup took an entire day of opaque errors and insulting UX; it fought me every step.
Indeed, installing Windows is an even bigger pain than using it. But nothing beats „that's what came preinstalled“…
as long as you don't even consider debloating.
Then you start getting into the weeds of things. If you're a power user you reach for "O&O Shut Up"; for the plebs? Manually uninstalling "candy-crush" and reading arcane and dubious online tutorials about registry tweaks: if you're brave.. Otherwise its just living with mild discomfort (and in increasing amounts).
There was a discussion about this on the orange site... some people were pretty adamant that in enterprises Microsoft's enterprise management tooling is just very good (or at least easy to wrap your head around as a single entity), so even if for each individual feature a Linux box could do something similar, in aggregate the Linux box would need to have a looooot of disparate programs to make it all work
It always surprises me when people say Linux is difficult and requires a lot of hacks to get working. Maybe in 2015 that was true, I remember it being the case now and then; however, despite the box I am typing this on being difficult because it's been modded to hell and back, outside of that, I just install a distro in an hour and everything flies with very little configuration input from me (I personally adored PopOS last time I used it, everything worked by default).
Meanwhile, the Windows users I know are relying on a small bunch of custom-built scripts and applications to keep their Windows system usable in the face of in-OS advertising, privacy violation, and LLM-encroachment.
It's really funny to me! Especially in the face of about a decade of ribbing about using Linux, from Windows users, because of how "difficult" it was.
IME it depends on your hardware. A recent Ubuntu update silently disabled my nvidia graphics drivers, leaving me with a black screen on boot.
Sure, but that's on par with Windows, at least: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/3966607/windows-update-disabled-graphics-card
The only one you need: https://www.privacy.sexy/
Beware that some of these don't work!
Had a quick look, and found the first issue within a minute: select Linux, "disable OS data collection", "Disable connectivity checks (breaks Captive Portal detection", enable the "revert" option. The script depends on a $file variable that is never set.
I'd use it as a checklist, but would absolutely not run the scripts without a proper look through. I'd be afraid of a rm -rf bug, like https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671
Maybe it's been fixed since you posted that 26 hours ago, but it looks fine to me:
file='/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/20-disable-connectivity-privacy-sexy.conf'
content=$'# Created by privacy.sexy\n[connectivity]\nenabled=false'
directory="${file%/*}"
mkdir -p "$directory"
[ -f "$file" ]; then
echo "Skipping, connectivity checks are already disabled through $file."
else
echo -n "$content" | sudo tee "$file" > /dev/null
echo 'Successfully disabled connectivity checks.'
fi
The apply script seems to work (haven't tried it, only run a simulation on human fleshbag hardware), but the revert script is what's broken:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# https://privacy.sexy — v0.13.8 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 11:55:11 GMT
if [ "$EUID" -ne 0 ]; then
script_path=$([[ "$0" = /* ]] && echo "$0" || echo "$PWD/${0#./}")
sudo "$script_path" || (
echo 'Administrator privileges are required.'
exit 1
)
exit 0
fi
export HOME="/home/${SUDO_USER:-${USER}}" # Keep `~` and `$HOME` for user not `/root`.
# Disable connectivity checks (breaks Captive Portal detection) (revert)
echo '--- Disable connectivity checks (breaks Captive Portal detection) (revert)'
if ! command -v '/usr/sbin/NetworkManager' &> /dev/null; then
>&2 echo 'Cannot revert because "/usr/sbin/NetworkManager" is not found.'
else
if [ ! -f "$file" ]; then
echo 'Skipping, connectivity checks are not disabled.'
else
sudo rm -fv "$file"
echo 'Successfully restored connectivity checks.'
fi
if command -v 'nmcli' &> /dev/null; then
sudo nmcli general reload
echo 'Successfully reloaded configuration.'
else
echo 'It will take effect after reboot.'
fi
fi
# ----------------------------------------------------------
echo 'Your privacy and security is now hardened 🎉💪'
echo 'Press any key to exit.'
read -n 1 -s
I like the idea, but the script style really gives me the heebie jeebies... So many things that can go wrong!
Well-spotted. Definitely looks like that program wasn't properly tested.
Sorry for missing the part of your post where you did specify the "revert" program.
Not a whole lot of spotting on my part, it just stood out to my eyes. I think that the overall style helped along my gut feeling of "there's got to be something wrong here", and there it was -- it might as well have been surrounded by a <blink> tag.
And no worries, I'll just make sure to miss a word in one of your comments someday, just to keep the score even :)
Goodness gracious, I didn't even realize that they did something for Linux. That is a surprise!
I've only ever needed AutoHotKey because windows prevented me from doing something that was trivial on Linux. I think I last used it to rebind capslock to ctrl. (Although I will concede as an automation tool it is pretty good.)
I think at this point I've got like 75 hotkeys? Maybe a couple hundred if you add in the modal hotkeys, hotstrings, and application-specific hotkeys.
Sure, but as mplant says, it could be easy.
I had a guy telling me that "Linux sucks because it doesn't have a tool to invert the numbers and symbols on the top row" (IE; you have to hold shift to get 7, otherwise it's &).
I told him: "of course there's no tool for it, you can just modify the keymap"
So I wrote a keymap for him, and now his preference is native to his experience. Which is pretty dope.
Now, I don't know what your hotkeys do, and I don't know your desired userland experience. but; I have about 50~ (global) hotkeys defined in my sway config, so maybe it's possible. Inform your local linux nerd of your preferences.
Microsoft has a thing called Power Toys which is actually not bad: allows to remap all keys, has something like Raycast, is tightly integrated with the rest of Windows, and can be installed through winget from PowerShell.
And completely jumped over the shark a couple years ago. PowerToys used to be small, awesome utilities that don't get in your way, now it's a massive blob that inserts itself into autostart by default, and feels more like Norton Powertools, just that it at least works.
You could try https://github.com/RaiMan/SikuliX1 but the development model and fragility are all different
Then again, Windows 11 just added new store ads to the startup search
Right. Vista and 8 were really awful at launch and then improved somewhat over their lifetime. It feels like 11 is still not done getting crappier.
Is it really true that alternate releases are good? Does it actually change that much from one release to the next?
Windows 7 seemed just like Vista to me, except less slow, but that could have been entirely due to hardware improvements.
It was pretty accurate in my experience (Windows 95 -> Windows 7)
The "odd" releases like Vista felt like major UI changes that broke everything (and gradually got patched over time), while the "even" releases like XP were relatively small changes that seemed to fix a lot of bugs and performance issues. I don't know if this was an official policy or coincidence.
Windows XP was an absolutely major change. It rebuilt the consumer line of Windows on to NT. On top of that it had a whole new interface (dubbed "fisher price" by its detractors).
Arguably it was also awful at launch and took a few service packs before it improved.
took a few service packs
Yeah haha, everyone knew you just had to install SP2 for the optimal experience. Then it become a solid OS, arguably Microsoft's best one.
dubbed "fisher price" by its detractors
I didn't know this! Like the toy brand?
Yeah, it was a whole thing. Some people thought it looked like a toy interface compared to the more serious Windows 9x style.
I tried Win11 a few years ago (at the time they said it is "production ready" - didn't felt that way tho), I kept it for half a year to properly observe the pros and cons. I can confirm what I read in the post, nonsense on top of more nonsense. As the author, I downgraded to Win10 and using it since. Although. I discovered some "hacks" since then which gave me confidence that Win11 upgrade (and daily usage) should not be a pain, recipe as follows:
I didn't had the time yet to convert my workhorse, but it is on the roadmap. I only installed it in a VM yet, but boy, it is snappier than the host Win10 system!
Edit: forgot to add that right after startup, the memory consumption as at 1.9GB!
The biggest problem I have with Windows 11 might sound trivial, but it drives me nuts: taskbar buttons resize when the program changes its title. Like why would you do that?! I change tabs, it updates the window title, and suddenly there's movement on the taskbar. Ugh. Windows 10 ( i think inherited from 8) also regressed the taskbar with how you can't split up windows from the same program anymore, but it was at least still usable. I guess they designers looked at Vista or 7 (i think it was Vista but idk) were like "this is perfect..... time to change it!".
You can hack around the title resize with https://windhawk.net/mods/taskbar-labels which lets you set a fixed width for the taskbar buttons.
https://windhawk.net/mods/taskbar-grouping will let you split up two windows from the same program (and to change their order relative to one another).
"this is perfect..... time to change it!".
I think this is basically accurate, but for Windows 11. Somebody decided that it was a good idea to rewrite the taskbar from scratch. They implemented the MVP and left out a lot of features/options that people were using. Then they (very slowly) added some of them back in.
This is why Start11 was one of the first apps I installed on my Windows machine. 90% of what I use it for is just making the taskbar and start menu work the same way they did in previous versions of Windows.
Submitting because the author claimed the following (emphasis mine):
Linux as an alternative has been on my mind, obviously. However, there are some programs I use daily (like Scrivener) and are essential to me, but not supported on that OS. Using Wine is an option... well. Buggy option.
We heap praise on Linux for playing Windows games better than Windows. But what's the story with non-game apps?
WineHQ has this reputation for being buggy, but it has come a long way in the last 3-4 years. Everything I throw at it just works, games and non-games.
My experience with the improvement in quality of Wine has been similar. I think it's just that our memories of bugs we experience are, on average, far less temporary than the bugs themselves. It's what makes those bugs that outlive all the others so mythical; the ancient WONTFIX passed down through the generations... also emulating software interfaces built on generations of WONTFIX is hard 😅
It's really hard to say without knowing what the apps are. There's the whole https://appdb.winehq.org/ available for example
It's funny because on one hand I really like WSL2 (without it I'd have moved off Windows for my main workstation a long time ago). On the other, there is far far too much crapware which increases with every Windows release.
I still really struggle with Linux desktop (for context, I first 'switched' to Linux desktop with Mandrake desktop in ~1999, but moved back). It's got a lot lot better over the years - hardware compatibility is actually better than Windows out of the box now, but I still find the UI itself incredibly glitchy. For example, I cannot get non-integer font scaling working properly across all apps.
I actually love ElementaryOS desktop environment - it reminds me of a better MacOS - but the UI is super super buggy (there was quite a humorous bug I came across while moving items in the 'dock' that caused the window to shake uncontrollably). I believe they've fixed a bunch of this in the latest release, along with integer font scaling.
The thing is though I'm going to have to move eventually, because I spend nearly all my "working" time in WSL2 and as good as it is, it's still an abstraction layer and some things aren't great (for example, listing Windows files from within Linux is unbelievably slow).
My total wildcard prediction is Microsoft makes a "developer" Linux distribution in the near future, or has some sort of frankenstein Windows version that actually runs on Linux kernel. I think Microsoft must increasingly look at Windows as a problem, not a competitive advantage. I use dotnet a lot and I don't know anyone (apart from very legacy apps) that runs it on Windows server. Azure is increasingly Linux first (it defaults to Linux VMs afiak); SQL Server runs on Linux, etc. It's a lot of hassle for not much upside in terms of license revenue (compared to Azure itself, Teams, O365, etc). It's 10% of their revenue and shrinking in relative terms year on year.
Honestly, just switch. Accept the drop in performance. Schedule it for e.g. summer, and just give it couple weeks. You'll adjust, spend some evenings drilling into issues that bother you and come out back on a productivity gains curve above what you have with Windows.
The small things put smile on your face. Such as ext4 on NVMe, Kitty or other GPU accelerated terminal emulators. Workspace management in your desktop environment (after inevitable tweaks).
As for the bugs, just start with something mainstream. Both GNOME and KDE are actually pretty solid. Debian, Fedora and Arch are all well-rounded, strong distibutions for desktop
Also, some fractional scaling issues were fixed in the last year. Your best bet is KDE here, I think they have separate settings for X scaling. You've likely been bitten by electron apps running through XWayland.
listing Windows files from within Linux is unbelievably slow
Using ls -f can help if you only need the filenames and nothing else. Or ls --color=never (or unalias ls to stop automatically passing --color=auto to ls). Or printf "%s\n" *. Or find -maxdepth 1. Getting the list of files isn't that slow; it is all the stat calls that really hurt.
If you want to keep using unix shells/utilities but want to avoid running into cross filesystem performance issues, Git Bash (or MSYS2 for more control over package management, via pacman) is a very good option.
For example, I cannot get non-integer font scaling working properly across all apps.
Has worked fine for me in GNOME since they added the xwayland-native-scaling option to mutter: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI#Xwayland
Mint/Cinnamon is pretty solid, that's what I use now. Have KDE/Fedora on another box and like it, though the UI is a bit fiddly.
If things like Scrivener are really the only outliers for someone, I'd recommend they try winboat or one of the similar docker-based things, to see if that does the job. I expect that it wouldn't work for things that need direct access to video hardwoare, etc., but it really should work well for an editor.
If it's something like autohotkey, as in @hwayne 's case, that's a much stickier wicket. There are good ways to automate lots of things on desktop Linux, but they're all pretty different from AHK; I don't think I know of anything that's 1:1 there, especially now that you need to include Wayland in the mix.
Yo can wait for Win12 but I get the feeling they are just going to keep incrementing Win11 from now on.
Honestly it's been surprising to me just how buggy Windows 11 is, to the point where my Linux boot partition on my computers is now far more stable than Windows, even running wayland with nvidia cards. From apps opening off-screen, to sleep issues, to the actual OS just being un-response (explorer.exe has stopped working).
Unfortunately, downgrading meant a need for a clean install. Those are always huge pain in the ass, but okay, whatever
I remember this feeling. One thing I love about Linux is that it gives you the option to use separate /home and system partitions/volumes. I'm only doing that because it's the default on Fedora, but it makes performing a clean install trivial, if need be. You can manually configure a separate "data" partition on Windows too, but since most programs default to storing their data under C:, I don't think it's very common.
I will never not be ticked off by how on windows you need AHK to use capslock for something that's not locking caps. On Linux setting up capslock as keyboard layout toggle has always been as trivial as a single setxkbmap command
Before Win11, swapping caps lock and control was a simple registry change.
I don't exactly remember what I did when I setup my current Win11 work computer, but I googled, got a result, and I believe executed a PS command to implement the same thing.
For my previous loaner laptop I did not have local admin access and had to resort to the appropriate PowerToy.
All in all, I would say that it's as simple to change the caps lock behavior on Win11 as it is to edit Xkbmap.
MacOS has the best solution, it's a setting in the keyboard preferences IIRC.
Swapping capslock to act as a different key? Sure, it's possible, if a little less documented than xkb. But whatever key you swap it with, you just. can. not. map keyboard layout toggle to it.
macOS is my favorite for keyboard remapping because you can install Karabiner Elements and Hammerspoon. Any weird keyboard cording you could possibly want can be associated with any possible CLI or GUI action. I've found it significantly easier to use than AHK or setxkbmap.