Windows 11 Pro Sucks

[Cheerful Charlie]

I have been running a new small form factor computer with Windows 11 Pro.
Windows 11 pro sucks. Lots of Windows users agree and have been going
back to Windows 10. And now Microsoft has announced an end of life for
Windows 10 early in 2025. And then it is on to Windows 12. I need to go
back to Linux.

Windows 11 pro is not quite a finished OS and there are a lot of broken bits.
The Linux ecosystem is shattering into dozens of different and complex OS's.
Browsers are losing abilities, such as Google downgrading Chrome based
browser's abilities to use ad blockers freely.

My head hurts.

 

[bilby]

Windows has sucked giant donkey balls since the demise of XP.

XP wasn't great; But the massive reluctance of everyone outside MS to move on from it shows just how awful subsequent versions of Windows really are.

Until this year, the only Windows based tech I used was the ticketing and route management system at work. The old system (which is still in the process of being replaced, and is still in use) ran on Win XPe, the embedded systems variant of XP. The new system is a more recent version of Windows embedded, and it is utterly shit.

The most important "feature" of embedded systems for heavy vehicle operations, is that they should never distract to operator from his primary task of safely operating the vehicle. I don't care if it works or doesn't; But it should fail quietly and infrequently.

The new system hits neither benchmark; It fails frequently, with un-prompted and apparently random OS restarts a common occurence; and when it restarts, it lights up with a series of splash screens that are at full brightness - which at night means you can suddenly no longer see the road.

I want it to just keep going; But if it can't, I want it to die quietly. But it's Windows, so it can achieve neither of these modest objectives.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Windows 2000 was a beast, loved it!

So far, Windows 11 is better than 10, with Windows 10's "an attempt to update has now permanently broken your computer's ability to do stuff quickly... please wait while the CPU burns up the motherboard at 105% usage" feature. It is incredible what Microsoft gets away with. Security, as far as I'm aware, is better, though not great, though typically the user has to screw up first.

Linux is great as long as you aren't planning on using it for gaming or using software that your comfortable with. I tried Ubuntu a couple of times, but in the end, it just felt like "great, but what do I do with it?"

 

[bilby]

Linux is great as long as you aren't planning on using it for gaming or using software that your comfortable with.

I am now far more comfortable with Libre Office than with MS Office. Most stuff these days seems to be browser based anyway, with much of the actual computing done on a remote server, so it's theorectically OS neutral - if it works in Firefox on Windows, it also works in Firefox on Linux. Apparently you can even install Edge on Linux, if you are batshit crazy enough.

The last decent version of Excel was 2003; Libre Office Calc still feels like that. There are some minor differences on the VBA side, so if you write your own macros or formulae, you need to get used to some changes. But it doesn't have the dreaded "ribbon", so I am more than happy to forgive.

I haven't played a computer game since the days of Elite and Manic Miner on ZX Spectrum, so I can't comment much on that side of things, other than to point out that software houses write for the platforms users have, so if you want games developers to write for Linux, you need to get lots of people to start using Linux. If you're not a part of the solution, you're a part of the problem

If you're using specialised local software, for CAD, photo/video editing, or enterprise tools of various kinds, then there will be a learning period, and maybe a feeling of reinventing the wheel - but then, that can happen just because the software vendor decides to make a UI change in their latest major release, even if you stick to one OS religiously.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Linux is great as long as you aren't planning on using it for gaming or using software that your comfortable with.

I am now far more comfortable with Libre Office than with MS Office. Most stuff these days seems to be browser based anyway, with much of the actual computing done on a remote server, so it's theorectically OS neutral - if it works in Firefox on Windows, it also works in Firefox on Linux. Apparently you can even install Edge on Linux, if you are batshit crazy enough.

The last decent version of Excel was 2003; Libre Office Calc still feels like that. There are some minor differences on the VBA side, so if you write your own macros or formulae, you need to get used to some changes. But it doesn't have the dreaded "ribbon", so I am more than happy to forgive.

I'm too built into VBA to go outside it. And the office uses MS anyway, so no options there. That isn't to say I don't have MS Office. I have wasted too much time in my life trying to get the fucking paragraph to stop going onto the next page too many times.

I haven't played a computer game since the days of Elite and Manic Miner on ZX Spectrum, so I can't comment much on that side of things, other than to point out that software houses write for the platforms users have, so if you want games developers to write for Linux, you need to get lots of people to start using Linux.

Yeah, and voting for Ralph Nader got the Democrat Party to move to the left.

If you're not a part of the solution, you're a part of the problem

I'm actually quite content in knowing that corporate America doesn't give a damn what I think and what I use.

If you're using specialised local software, for CAD, photo/video editing, or enterprise tools of various kinds, then there will be a learning period, and maybe a feeling of reinventing the wheel - but then, that can happen just because the software vendor decides to make a UI change in their latest major release, even if you stick to one OS religiously.

Well, as soon as Civil3D, OpenRoads, MS Office, any number of analysis programs move to Linux...

I'm actually in a situation where we likely need to create software due to the vacuum being created by the large software firms that have bought everything up.

 

[James Brown]

Last year I tried to convert an old HP Windows laptop and install Ubuntu on it.

After countless tries and buying a new hard drive, I discovered that the laptop came with a chipset that is incompatible with Linux in any form or fashion, and that I was stuck with Windows on this particular hardware. Except all of my efforts had wiped out Windows with no chance for recovery. $900 paperweight.

 

[bigfield]

Linux is great as long as you aren't planning on using it for gaming or using software that your comfortable with.

The software I'm comfortable with is on Linux.

Plus, Steam has Proton now. Works pretty well.

 

[ZiprHead]

Last year I tried to convert an old HP Windows laptop and install Ubuntu on it.

After countless tries and buying a new hard drive, I discovered that the laptop came with a chipset that is incompatible with Linux in any form or fashion, and that I was stuck with Windows on this particular hardware. Except all of my efforts had wiped out Windows with no chance for recovery. $900 paperweight.

I don't understand how trying to install an OS would ruin a computer. Can you explain?

 

[bigfield]

Last year I tried to convert an old HP Windows laptop and install Ubuntu on it.

After countless tries and buying a new hard drive, I discovered that the laptop came with a chipset that is incompatible with Linux in any form or fashion, and that I was stuck with Windows on this particular hardware. Except all of my efforts had wiped out Windows with no chance for recovery. $900 paperweight.

I don't understand how trying to install an OS would ruin a computer. Can you explain?

Possibly UEFI Secure Boot?

 

[ZiprHead]

Possibly UEFI Secure Boot?

Not finding anything that says Secure Boot can completely disable a computer. I do wonder though if turning that off would fix James Brown's computer and allow OS installation. Lots of links out there on how to disable it.

 

[bigfield]

Possibly UEFI Secure Boot?

Not finding anything that says Secure Boot can completely disable a computer. I do wonder though if turning that off would fix James Brown's computer and allow OS installation. Lots of links out there on how to disable it.

Right, yeah, IIRC Secure Boot can prevent a PC from using bootloaders that don't have a registered key, which basically means that some laptops can only ever run Windows, but that should only prevent Linux installation, not prevent Windows reinstallation.

Mind you, reinstalling Windows isn't always a trivial task: you have to get or make the installation media and then tell the BIOS to boot from the right device, and probably disable fast boot, etc.

Anyway what are we even talking about? It's an HP laptop - it belongs in the bin.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Possibly UEFI Secure Boot?

Not finding anything that says Secure Boot can completely disable a computer. I do wonder though if turning that off would fix James Brown's computer and allow OS installation. Lots of links out there on how to disable it.

Disabling Secure Boot

Disabling Secure Boot

learn.microsoft.com

"If you're running certain PC graphics cards, hardware, or operating systems such as Linux or previous version of Windows you may need to disable Secure Boot."

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

SecureBoot - Debian Wiki

wiki.debian.org

Most anything you want to know about secure boot and Linux. This is about Debian but should work for any Linux distro. You may find doing so has a different manner of doing this depending on your computer's BIOS.

 

[barbos]

Have been sitting on unix-linux all my life.
Occasionally have to install windows in order to run something which is windows only.
Sometimes in VMware sometimes natively. It's such a crap.

 

[Worldtraveller]

I haven't had a specific issues with Win 11 yet. There are some features I like slightly better than Win 10, but in general the improvements, as usual with MS products all seem to make it worse. I suspect a lot of them are intended to improve the mobile user experience, like using the surface (I think that's the MS product), and on a desktop, it's just irritating.

 

[James Brown]

Last year I tried to convert an old HP Windows laptop and install Ubuntu on it.

After countless tries and buying a new hard drive, I discovered that the laptop came with a chipset that is incompatible with Linux in any form or fashion, and that I was stuck with Windows on this particular hardware. Except all of my efforts had wiped out Windows with no chance for recovery. $900 paperweight.

I don't understand how trying to install an OS would ruin a computer. Can you explain?

Possibly UEFI Secure Boot?

That was exactly it. I downloaded Ubuntu with an eye toward over-writing the Windows 10, but mid-way through the installation I got a message that (I don't recall the exact wording) that Ubuntu can't be installed with <blah> enabled. I disabled it in the BIOS but it still wouldn't work. I tried getting back to Windows with Safe Mode and various recovery methods. Finally--because I didn't care about the Windows install--I tried formatting the drive, but Ubuntu still wouldn't install.

Finally I bought a new hard drive for a hundred bucks, swapped it out, and Ubuntu still wouldn't load for the same reason. By this time, Windows was toast, Ubuntu was a non-starter, and some obscure forums led me to conclude it was the chipset that was causing the problem and could not be changed. Now the laptop is a brick and I'm still here on Windows 11 on a different HP laptop.

I guess the solution is to stay away from Best Buy and buy a laptop online with Linux pre-installed.

 

[bigfield]

I guess the solution is to stay away from Best Buy and buy a laptop online with Linux pre-installed.

Hardly anything comes with a Linux desktop OS pre-installed, except maybe Raspberry Pi. There are a billion Linux distros out there. Better off shipping the PC with no OS at all.

I haven't bought a laptop in a long time but if I did I would expect that I could install Ubuntu on any machine that comes preinstalled with Windows. Even some HP piece of shit.

https://ubuntu.com/certified/laptops

If I were in the market for a laptop today, I'd probably buy a refurbished Dell.

Now the laptop is a brick

How bricked? Like you can't even get into BIOS?

 

[James Brown]

BIOS, yes. Beyond that, nothing.

 

[bigfield]

BIOS, yes. Beyond that, nothing.

That's not too bad - you could still plug in a bootable Linux USB and make USB the first boot device in your BIOS settings.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

BIOS, yes. Beyond that, nothing.

Possibly a corrupted BIOS. This might entail downloading a BIOS for your machine on a USB flash drive and doing a BIOS reinstall. Which of course means using another computer to down load and burn the BIOS. Check the website of HP for a BIOS for your model and procedures for reinstalling a BIOS. Corrupted BIOSes are not common, but they do happen.