You paid me, a long-time Linux user, to use Windows 11 exclusively for a month: here’s how it went
130 points by ninakali
130 points by ninakali
It does not escape me that it's written like the Linux-bashing critiques of late 00's up to mid 10's. Down to same kinds of problems faced between the two points in time.
I partially thought that, too, when it came to inconsistent UI and hardware issues. Ironic that the widly distributed chaos OSS folks got their shit together, while the one company controlling their whole OS lost it.
Though I don't think ads or bad package management were ever worse on Linux than they were on Windows? Except of course the just plain unavailability of usable alternatives for many enterprise/windows only tools.
it's written like the Linux-bashing critiques
I am absolutely sure this is intentional. TomH has been around for a long time and while I disagree with some of his opinions, we share a lot of the same preferences (e.g. BeOS) and I have written for OSnews once or twice (for free!).
I think it's deliberate.
I'm a full-time Linux writer these days and I like it, but I used to be a Windows guy. I still find Win10 pleasant enough to use, although Win7 was better, and Windows 2000 was better than that. For speed, Windows NT 3.51 was the peak of the NT family, though, and I had so many hotkeys and things it was a lovely OS to drive.
But Windows 11... eugh. Worse than Vista, worse than ME. I find it hard to understand how anyone tolerates it.
But Windows 11... eugh. Worse than Vista, worse than ME. I find it hard to understand how anyone tolerates it.
I suppose in a certain (maybe gaming) bubble it is a mix of hardware support and still wanting security upgrades. As in: Most people I know would have stayed on 10, if it needs to be Windows, but new hardware etc. As to why windows at all: I guess you know all the arguments, no matter if people find them good or bad.
But tolerate is the correct choice, I guess.
Win10 LTSC is still getting updates. I am surprised that MS never updated the codebase to the final Win10 build, 22H2 (build 19045). LTSC is still on the previous year's build, 21H2 (Build - 19044.1288).
But either way, it works, it gets regular updates, and it's pleasantly clean. No Windows Store, no "Modern" apps at all, no OneDrive, no integration with the MS cloud. Local user accounts only by default. It's the same OS with all the bundled bloatware missing. You can add the Windows Store and OneDrive if you want: I've done it experimentally and it worked.
But I am seeing apps starting to complain or warn about it, simply because it's version 10.
If anyone, like me, has to run Windows occasionally but doesn't want to, it's a decent option. It works on bare metal, runs quite quickly under the now-free-to-use VMware, and integrates perfectly with WinApps and WinBoat.
Yeah I know but you're already preselecting for people who are willing to just reinstall a different version of the same OS (usually from some seemingly dubious site).
Ofc it works, but "staying on Win 10" feels a lot more mainstream than redoing LTSC. That's even too much for some gamers I know.
roughly one out of three sleep cycles, Windows would spin up the fans to maximum blast, for long periods of time before actually going to sleep; on some occasions, sleep would never set in at all, forcing a reboot as the screen wouldn’t come back on either. This seems to be a widely reported problem on a whole slew of different hardware configurations, so I’m assuming Windows 11 is just trash at putting devices to sleep properly.
This is a real issue. I once had a laptop with Windows 11 get extremely hot because I shut the lid, assumed it would go to sleep, put it in my bag, and it did not go to sleep. About ten minutes later, I wondered what the weird noise was, and pulled the laptop out of my bag, fans spinning on full blast, and so hot to the touch it burned. I was glad there was no apparent hardware damage. After that incident, I'd only transport it after doing a full shutdown. That was a chore.
In general, that very same laptop would often have the fans loudly spinning for at least a minute after I shut the lid. This was a rude surprise after previously using a MacBook, which you can trust will go to sleep when you expect them to go to sleep.
Overall, about a month ago I moved back to Linux after using Windows 11 for the better part of a year. I relate to being frustrated with missing drivers that I expected to be included, Windows Explorer being very janky and slow, and the whole thing feeling like a slog and a chore to use, even when debloated and on a relatively powerful PC. And I had frequent issues with WSL, although apparently those are less common.
It was easier to put up with at first (I think at a month I was still feeling okay with it), but by the end of it I couldn't stand Windows. Coming back to Fedora with Plasma felt like leaving a bad relationship.
The only thing I found better on Windows is games that use ray tracing, and HDR.
It somewhat(*) baffles me that after decades of personal computers shrinking and becoming more portable that sleep states and power efficiency are still unsolved problems for mass market consumer devices. This is so fundamental to a good user experience you would think that this would be table stakes like USB audio class compliance or PS/2 drivers. Regardless of the complexity it's something that should "just work."
(*) it's actually not that baffling, sleep states are annoyingly complex to maintain across the different subsystems. But you would think that this is where engineers and their managers would have some kind of personal grudge here where they do things not because they're easy but because the device is going to burn someone or die when it's most needed if they don't.
They aren’t even unsolved! Phones handle this just fine, while doing much more (receiving calls and notifications), and they’re mostly the same things in a different form factor! This is what the new “modern sleep” is supposed to do on laptops, with basically the same implementation on the hardware, but Microsoft is inexplicably unable to make it work (even on laptops running on the same chips which go on those phones) despite every smartphone brand managing it fine.
aiui (invoking Cunningham's law here) is that x86_64 and BIOS/UEFI are excessively complex at managing power states correctly (there's a weird taxonomy of power controlled by the CPU itself, the BIOS, the OS scheduler, user preferences, and it's not particularly holistic). So I don't know if the problem is even solvable within the constraints of Windows laptop manufacturers design decisions over CPU/GPU/memory/disk/bios/network card/etc where all of them need to have their power managed by a competing set of controllers that may disagree.
Yeah I guess an SoC makes things easier, but doesn’t fully explain how they’re still struggling with it on the ARM laptops (though I think they do use UEFI). I think it might have more to do with the hot mess that is the windows driver ecosystem where vendors can’t stop waking the CPU for no reason.
Still, ultimately I think that the reason is that Microsoft doesn’t really care… I’m sure they could put some time into debugging and fixing all these issues if they wished, at least for their own laptops. It’s just insane how much better Apple is at this.
RT, HDR.
Yea, performance of RT; and existence of AutoHDR are virtually the sole reasons I ever use my W11 partition.
This article more than any other I've read recently makes me want to move full time to a Fedora desktop. Great writeup.
Reading this revealed to me that I have been using Windows for so long that I've forgotten the true pain associated with using it. I have customized my install to the extent that none of these things happen to me, but it took ages to get here, and I still struggle with other random problems (that are in all likelihood Windows related).
I will say that it seems like the person writing this forced themselves into a bad experience: why pay for an Office subscription? Why use Outlook? Why use Edge? Why not use chocolatey? It seems that they were interested in using Windows as Microsoft intends you to use it, but I am not sure why they would make that choice. Windows is very customizable and the variety of apps and configurations available to you is one of the few good things about Windows. Treating Windows 11 as a platform on which you must conform to Microsoft's applications, subscriptions, and prescriptions seems like a recipe to have a terrible experience (even though it is a very common one).
I would imagine going through that experience was an attempt to understand what the default Windows experience looks like, because if the default is bad it stands to reason that even highly customized experiences will still be lacking in some capacity.
Is that a fair comparison to a platform where customization is the default? Anybody coming from Linux will also customize their Windows. Anybody coming from Windows who can't afford time on customization isn't gonna have a good Linux experience either.
I don't know any GNOME users who customize anything.
It's not just GNOME users, either. I have observed several users of XFCE and KDE who just use the distro's defaults, even if they did go out of their way to select a distro that had XFCE or KDE in the first place.
Some people are almost militantly opposed to customizing much of their setup. For the one (who was an XFCE user) that I asked, he said he likes to keep his customization of everything, even his editor (emacs, fwiw) to a bare minimum.
Xfce user here, and I keep close to the default layout because the default makes sense and is usable right out of the box. I do make a few changes on a new installation; dark GTK theme, the "Today" window manager theme for accessibility (my biggest pet peeve with any interface is resize handles that are exactly one pixel wide and invisible; I shouldn't have to struggle with my mouse and squint at the screen just to resize a window!), and I add a few plugins to the taskbar. Otherwise, stock Xfce as shipped from the project stays out of my way and lets me actually work and play on the computer, rather than work to make the computer usable.
My biggest issue with GNOME 3 and later is the same as most people: it expects you to conform to its layout and workflow, rather than allowing you to change it to suit your needs. KDE is the exact opposite and in my experience, overwhelming in its ability to be customized. Xfce hits that nice sweet spot of sensible defaults without letting you go crazy and get lost in a maze of customization.
I don't mean ricing. I mean getting the stuff you need to do work. There's a choice at every step. It's overwhelming for many people. If it's not it isn't going to be overwhelming to look for alternative programs in Windows either.
I would imagine going through that experience was an attempt to understand what the default Windows experience looks like
If that were the case, you wouldn't start off with a laptop designed for Linux. You'd grab some off-the-shelf thing that already has Windows on it because that is the default windows experience. The Windows install process isn't something most users ever see or experience.
That's a fair critique, but:
and
I believe there was a humorous point being made here about (2) as much as there was an attempt to portray the default experience by deviating as little as possible from the vendor's "happy path" for those who were doing the install themselves.
No power user keeps the preinstalled Windows. Everyone reinstalls from scratch to nuke the junkware.
On desktop perhaps. Going without the manufacturer's default setup on a laptop is just asking for the power management or function keys or something to break.
Way back in the days I have been forced to dual boot to Windows, manufacturers used to provide collection of relevant drivers on their websites.
In the past decade or so, by my observation, if those drivers aren't in Windows Update, they're often bundled with most of the bloat"utilities" that you're doing the reinstall to get rid of. The reinstall still helps, since they're not generally bundled with the trialware crap. But it can be difficult or near-impossible to extract just the drivers and not get the vendor's phone home service tag checker with them.
Treating Windows 11 as a platform on which you must conform to Microsoft's applications, subscriptions, and prescriptions seems like a recipe to have a terrible experience
I'm pretty sure that was Thom's point, to show exactly what it's like to use Windows as Microsoft intended. The result, of course, is that it is indeed miserable and that's why almost no one uses Windows that way unless forced to.
As the sysadmin at my workplace I go out of my way to de-enshittify our workstations as much as I possibly can. If we didn't rely on a couple of Windows-specific applications I'd have us all on Linux based workstations, like Advance Auto Parts used to do across all their stores (maybe still does?).
Now that you mention it, I remembered that many organisations force people to use Windows 11 with Outlook and Edge and these people don't know any better 😓 perhaps this was a part of the motivation for this specific experience?
For sure many orgs lock things down such that alternative web browsers and email clients are not allowed to be installed/used. So, some users do know better, but are not able to use alternatives...so this experience could have sort of mimiced such a constrained environment as well i suppose.
I was never given an option to change my home folder’s name
I got hit by that one. I needed to do some temporary name for the user at the setup time for $reasons and thought I'll just rename it later. No... because I was frustrated at various things broken with the installer, my home directory is now stuck with "fuckme", even though the user is renamed.
I'm glad it totally never showed up in a customer's stack trace when a .net app crashed... (Spoiler: it did)
A desktop operating system needs to come with a solid, serviceable email client. I consider this non-optional.
Linux is far from having a solid, serviceable email client unless you like using old or haphazardly-designed software and/or you're using an email service from the 1990s. Thunderbird is quirky and its design, even the updated one, leaves a lot to be desired (especially with how the header list is displayed). Geary is far too barebones for my taste. Mailspring never works for me properly (doesn't download all headers/etc, despite acting like it's trying). And all the others are literally made decades ago with no real interest in updating design.
And none of them really work seamlessly with Gmail for mail, contacts, and calendaring. It always takes a lot of effort to really get them to the same state I can get in a matter of seconds using a modern email client like Spark on Windows/MacOS. (no, this is not an ad for Spark, just happens to be what I use currently mainly for the ease of getting up and running...I despise the AI nonsense they're trying to do with it).
Windows 11 feels like an endless string of punches in the face.
Overall, I agree with most of what was written in the article. But I do wonder just how often the author has to tinker in Linux (command-line, config files, etc). Do they lament having that kind of tedium in Linux? Or is it more that they are so used to their workflow in Linux, they no longer see the level of effort because it's now muscle memory?
To a Windows or Mac user who has their workflow embedded in their muscles' memory, Linux would likely also feel like an endless string of punches in the face.
FYI, Spark, like the modern Outlook webapp, processes your mail on "cloud". Spark is AWS, us-east-01.
Yep, I know. But sadly right now it's the best email client out there and works the same for me on Windows and MacOS. And it eliminates any friction to getting up and running.
I get that it means I'm trading privacy for convenience, but until there's a better option for me that works perfectly with Gmail, is cross-OS compatible, and has a modern design, I'll be sticking with it, for now.
Evolution feels like a "standard" email client to me, and works well enough for my very basic needs. Where does it fall on the spectrum here?
Based on some recent experiences I concluded that Microsoft is where software goes to die. That may be unkind but I don’t see very many signs of the contrary.
On one hand I can't wait for the teased macOS experience review; on the other I hope it is post-Tahoe, lest it focus on the same pain points we've discussed all year.
some rando's opinion: Tahoe was terrible, but Golden Gate is alright. I still prefer look of couple of widgets that Sequoia had, but it's not a deal-breaker. I miss Cmd/Ctrl split when I'm on Linux or Windows.
I miss Cmd/Ctrl split when I'm on Linux or Windows.
try out redbear's toshy on linux. it's a game changer for me... the wiki is a formidable beast but the install took a few seconds and transformed linux into something usable for my mac brain. https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy
That's on my list of things to try. I also miss the cmd/ctrl split, especially when I'm using something vim-flavored.
When i switched to linux full time i put off installing that because it seemed like it would be a hassle to setup and get working... install was a breeze and it worked great out of the box... i kicked myself for being dumb about it for a month or two.
It's also easy to turn off too if you don't like it for some reason
I went through a similar exercise 4 years ago (wow, time flies) and wrote about it in this series: https://jmmv.dev/2022/03/a-year-on-windows-intro.html
At the time that was Windows 10 and I ended up being pretty happy with the move and day-to-day use. But then Windows 11 came... and at some point I became incredibly fed up with the constant nag from popups, notifications, updates, ads, switch to OneDrive backups, switch to Edge, etc. and the general slowness of the system even on a brand-new laptop (which is not underpowered by any means, yet the fans have to continuously run for some reason).
These days I use Fedora (again) with KDE and it's great how peaceful the computing experience is. I can get work done, no random nagging.
Hey, I read your blog post series when I was trying out Windows last year! It was really great. Especially with your perspective as a long-term Unix user — it was rare to see a serious overview of Windows as a daily driver from a long-term user of Linux/BSDs. And I discovered PowerToys thanks to your posts!
When I was moving back to Fedora, I actually wondered how "the person who wrote those posts" felt about Windows now, so I have my answer (sad chuckle).
But thank you for writing that series!
For anyone whose work computer runs Windows and is frustrated by the lack of features like “remap caps lock to escape” (or control), Microsoft has made a suite of tools called PowerToys that includes a bunch of little quality of life improvements that can be individually toggled. Making any window always on top is also a feature I miss from KDE, but PowerToys lets you do that.
Another problem were the laptop’s cooling fans seemingly leading lives of their own, spinning up loudly at entirely random times, irrespective of use.
This has been such a massive issue for me. On my Linux partition on a very powerful gaming laptop, it remains cool at idle unless I am actively doing something. On Windows something always seems to be running, causing the laptop to be loud and hot. This is specifically an issue when running connected to external monitors with the lid closed, as the heat degrades the display.
My Ubuntu laptop definitely does this a lot, and I've never been able to figure out the root cause. I always just end up killing whatever processes are using the most CPU until it stops.
The single thing that makes windows unusable for me is the fact that I can't mount my (much larger) HDD as a folder (e.g. C:\Program files) like how I can do on any *nix system and mount it at /home
I guess this is a problem that no one has on windows and if you complain they will genuinely just ask you to change the install directory in the installer of the app you are installing (where to find this setting in $FOO_setup.exe? who knows) (at least you can change where all your library folders are ig (which btw default to fucking onedrive))
I baffles my mind I have no idea how they live like this
Ehm, you totally can mount a partition as a folder, though you'll be having issues with mapping to several special folders.
I can't mount my (much larger) HDD as a folder
You can.
But it breaks things and it's not worth it.
(20Y ago, I hand-built a custom WinXP install ISO that used separate partitions for the OS, the "Program Files" tree, the "Documents and Settings" tree, and swap. It worked fine but it was fragile and you had to create all the partitions in advance before booting the installer.)
Drives work fine and there's nothing privileged and special about the Unix "it's one big tree" approach.
I baffles my mind I have no idea how they live like this
NTFS supports symbolic links, so every time I've had that problem, I've used them with success. It's true that it could be easier to do, but it works. :)