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Comment by thot_experiment

19 days ago

I cannot see myself installing Windows 11, it's sad, I've been primarily a windows guy for my home computer since W95 and I'll miss it. Windows 10 (LTSC) has been the best operating system experience of my life, once I disabled updates and all the nag screens it's been rock solid for me for many years. It's so important to be able to trust that your computer works the same way tomorrow as it does today.

I hope that there's enough people like me that the combined community will keep it alive for a few years longer, but I know eventually something will force me to upgrade to Linux.

13 comments

thot_experiment

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htx80nerd  18 days ago

I started on Win 3.1. Win95 and 98 were so cool. Then I thought Win2k Pro was the best thing that even happened. WinXP was probably the last time I cared a lot about Windows. Vista looked cool. Then things just got worse and worse.

I have a medium-range gaming laptop running Windows 11. Dedicated GPU, extra RAM, etc. It "boots to ready" worlds slower than any of my low end Linux laptops. Windows is just so ungodly slow.

Somewhere around 2020 I changed my work laptop to use Linux only, no dual boot. MS was pushing 20GB patches, which is unreal. At the time I had AT&T DSL.

I had been using Linux on and off since the early 2000s. But the 20GB patches and 'ransom-ware' pushed me to Linux full time.

There are no apps I use that are 'windows only' so Im free. Windows is made by a mega-corp and it's just gotten out of control. "Update and shutdown" always just reboots. You can spend ~1hr doing an OS update with multiple reboots. I can install Linux + LibreOffice in ~15mins or less. A full Linux updated is like ~5min to ~10min, or less.

  • thot_experiment  18 days ago

    Yeah, this is the chief issue with Windows, LTSC helps but I've gone further and only let this system update about 3 times in the last 5 years. That plus disabling all signature enforcement, zone.identifiers and other nonsense "security" stuff makes Windows pretty great. I have never lost time to a random windows update since the first time it happened to me, it's just an unacceptable UX, I would have swapped to linux long ago if I wasn't able to disable it.

duxup  19 days ago

I was a windows guy for a long time. I went to macOS. Despite the complaints I've seen on the internet I've been very happy in macOS land. Someone mentioned that while macOS has "never been worse" the difference between windows and macOS "has never been greater".

Granted things like gaming might influence someone to not make that move.

  • thot_experiment  18 days ago

    macOS seems cool in theory, but in practice it's not a "you own your computer" operating system so it's just a no go off the bat for me, i get it for people that just kinda stay in the center of the bell curve when it comes to computer use, but there's a 100% chance i'd end up in some situation where i'm fighting against apple's locked-down ness in approx 20minutes of owning a mac.

    i'm fundamentally never going to accept a UX where i'm not absolute god of my computer, if i want to delete files crucial to my system's ability to function or run something with kernel level access to all my memory that's MY prerogative, i cannot imagine using a computer that doesn't listen to me

    • abawany  18 days ago

      macos has gotten worse about this in recent releases - I was astounded when I learnt that apple news, apple books, and apple music are uninstallable; these are still removable on ios but not on macos for some reason.

      1 reply →

    • duxup  18 days ago

      I understand how some folks feel about that, it just hasn’t been a problem for me.

rldjbpin  16 days ago

> Windows 10 (LTSC) has been the best operating system experience of my life

Unless you've stumbled upon it by chance, the LTSC version of Windows is by far the recommended approach by forums online, particularly for those who do not want to run random scripts to remove unwanted elements.

Windows 11 happen to have its own variant [1], I wonder how it compares to the gold standard of the previous version.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-...

madduci  18 days ago

Coincidentally, if you switch to use Windows Server 2025 (which is W11), you end up with a much better experience. No forced updates, no ads or messed up things with account

bigstrat2003  18 days ago

I would kill for Windows 7, but with security updates only. It was the last truly great OS Microsoft made.