For my “convenience” and because in this way they can show ads and clickbait

Also: I SET A FUCKING GROUP POLICY THAT DISABLES THE SEARCH BAR; WHY THEY FUCKING IGNORE IT???

  • nottheengineer@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Classic microsoft move.

    Linux has gotten great over the years and keeps improving while windows gets worse and worse every day. This has been going on for many years now.

    I switched already and suggest you give it a shot as well. It’s honestly much easier than windows if you know the basics and understand how things are done there.

        • mesamune@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I just got a new game off steam, no issues with installation. Thats my experience this entire year.

      • citrusface@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Fantastic - made the jump a month ago. I don’t play FPS games. Those are the ones that have trouble running on Linux due to anti-cheast software, but the vast majority of my 600 steam games run with no issues it all - at sometimes running even better than on windows.

        For example division 2 was sluggish on win11 on my Lenovo y540 (integrated GeForce whatever gaming laptop card) with 16gig of ram, now that I swapped over to Pop!_os - it doesn’t lag at all.

        I mostly play single player games, but guild wars 2 2 and ff14 work great too if you are an MMO fan.

        PoE works great if you want an ARPG to play.

        Make the move and own your PC again.

      • FabledAepitaph@lemmy.world
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        I play mosty either indy games or just older games on an older gaming laptop (geforce 1070m based HP Omen) and Steam/Linux Mint work pretty great. Outer Wilds works even better in Linux now that I’ve begun using CoreCtrl to disable CPU power throttling. Otherwise, it runs about like it did on Windows. The MCC runs flawlessly. Recently purchased No Man’s Sky and it runs pretty well and is actually incredibly smooth–no idea how that one runs in Windows because I’ve been just using Linux full-time for maybe two months now.

        There is some weirdness like having to process Vulcan Shades before games boot up which can be annoying, but it hasn’t discouraged me yet. You can also skip that and the only difference is there might be a bit of stuttering for the first bit of game play. After going back to Windows to compare performance, I think it does this stuttering thing anyways?

        • dustyData@lemmy.world
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          Shader compiling is just a graphical technique. DX12 does it too. Just that, Vulkan is nice enough to tell you a bit about it, and Steam has preemptive compiling, which runs most of the compiling before running the game precisely to reduce stuttering during gameplay. If you recall when The Last of Us remake launched, a lot of people were reporting up to an hour of “Loading” time at the menu before the game was playable on first run, and some were even reporting compiling on every single run of the game just as long. That was a bug with DX12 Shader compiling and it was prominent in both consoles and Windows. It’s not a Vulkan thing, nor particular about Linux. That is just how graphically intensive games are made nowadays.

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          +1 for indie games. I really think we’re living in the golden age of indie gaming with tools like Godot, Unreal, and Unity (yes, yes, I know, but Unity is probably still the most popular engine for now). As indies get empowered more and more by tools like this, and AAA studios get greedier and greedier, I can’t find any reason to play anything that isn’t from an indie game developer.

          And most, nearly even all indie games work great on Linux, often even better than their Windows counterparts.

          • FabledAepitaph@lemmy.world
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            Mmhmm. I’ve started doing this and it does work fine. I think I saw a comment once that noted they compile faster in-game anyways. So that makes me feel better about skipping lol

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              Yeah that’s kinda what I figured- it just does it in the background!

              Vulkan skip gang rise up.

              • nvrmind@lemmy.world
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                Does it actually work that well? I’ve been waiting ages for halo shaders every time lmao

                • citrusface@lemmy.world
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                  Yeah - no different whatsoever - I’m pretty sure it just loads over time in the background once you start the game.

      • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Not a gamer myself but from reading it used to be “this is a limited list of games that will work in Linux” and now it’s a “this is a limited list of games that will not work”, with a lot of thanks to valve, pop-os!, etc.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        I have been a Linux gamer for the past 10 years. I haven’t booted into Windows to play a video game in 8.

        When I started out, it was very much a question of “Here is the list of games that work on Linux.” You had to look for that Steam logo next to the Windows or sometimes Apple logo on the Steam page, and there are some games I would have played years earlier had that logo been there. With Proton, it has switched to “Here is a list of the games that don’t work on Linux.” Because most just do, with the very notable exception of competitive shooters, because something something anticheat.

        I often hear that games actually run better on Linux than they do on Windows, except the newer whiz-bang features don’t work. Give a recent example, apparently Cyberpunk 2077 runs at a significantly higher framerate on Linux than Windows, but DLSS, HDR and RTX aren’t available.

        Let me tell you the tales of two gamers on Linux:

        My tale: I was disgusted with Windows 8.1, I had been learning some Linux because I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi with my ham radio stuff, so I went…why don’t I try switching? This was circa 2014. There was exactly one game in my Steam library that just could not be persuaded to run and that was Sleeping Dogs.

        There have been a few games I’ve wanted to try that refused to run in some way or another; Heave Ho! by Devolver Digital…the demo ran fine, had a good time with it. Bought the game, and the UI on the player select screen didn’t work. Grow Up or Grow Home (one is a sequel to the other, I forget which it was) launched, but the character didn’t respond to any controls. Oh and Fallout: New Vegas launched one of those Windows-style autorun screens then asked me to put in the DVD. I bought it from Steam. And refunded it.

        I generally avoid AAA games, I don’t play many online multiplayer games, I do play multiplayer games with friends, stuff like Stardew Valley or Unrailed, but I don’t go play with random people online, those just are not fun to me. I tend to prefer more indie stuff, more nerdy stuff, like I’ve got hundreds of hours in Factorio and Satisfactory, both work fine. I think it just so happens that I’m into games that are likely to be well supported on Linux. Antichamber, Firewatch, Hollow Knight, Return of the Obra Dinn, every Zachtronics game I’ve tried, Undertale, Subnautica, these all run great.

        My cousin: had an aging Dell upgraded from Windows 7 to 10 on an “optane boosted” hard disk drive, starting to run pretty sluggish. Swapping out the hard disk and optane module for an SSD and attempting to install Win10 on bare metal just wouldn’t work, it kept throwing cryptic errors, so to get the machine to work at all I put Linux Mint on it.

        She has more mainstream tastes than I do, lots of Bethesda and EA games. Funnily enough, I found that the third-party launchers were the real problem. The Sims 4 ran pretty well on Linux…Origin barely does. Minecraft support on Linux is actually worsening with time as a result of Microsoft’s involvement, but at least the Java edition does currently run.

        In brief, I have observed a very stark inverse relationship between Linux compatibility of games, and the size/corporateness/evilness of the developer.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Mildly inconvenient at worst unless certain anti cheat software is being used. At best, you can run games on Linux that your machine may not be able to handle on windows because distros that use more resources than windows are rare. Steam on Linux has proton built into it and it just works once you set it to run through it. You might have gpu driver trouble with Nvidia but it’s a maybe issue that happens less and less.

        I play Baldurs Gate 3 on it and it turned out the issues I thought might be linux related were hardware, when I fixed it it worked perfectly.

      • nottheengineer@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Great, I play a lot on it and the only game I had to use windows for so far was titanfall 2 because it kept stuttering on linux and troubleshooting stutter is hard.

        • thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org
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          In my experience, much of the studdering comes from the desktop environments. If you’re using Gnome, try KDE or one of the others. If it changes then it’s probably the Compositor settings. It’s a pain but once you find the right settings, oh yeah it’s great

          • nottheengineer@feddit.de
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            Thanks, I use KDE on X already (thank you nvidia) and find gnome’s design absolutely asinine, so I’ll try to fiddle around with the compositor settings.

      • Neshura@bookwormstory.social
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        Pretty great actually. Not as out of the box as on Windows but almost there. Firstly you get a vastly different experience depending on if you are using Steam. Since I have my entire library on Steam I can’t say anything about other stores. There’s imo 3 points where the experience still differs:

        1 - you have to enable Proton as the default compatability tool, Valve has a guide for it and the setting is pretty straightforward to find.

        2 - Most games just work now but a few don’t in those cases things like protondb.com are an enormous help.

        3 - Mods are hit and miss (Steam Workshop works fine) depending on the game, for Cyberpunk for example I had to mess with the Proton Config a bit but there were guides for it. However since we are now in a niche of a niche (modding a game running proton) you’re likely to run into unexplored territory

      • FallenGrove@lemmy.world
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        With the release of the steam deck Linux gaming has gotten a lot better and more support since their steam OS is a branch of Debian. A lot of games now support Linux gaming more than before.

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      Not every distro of Linux has gotten better, for the most part this comment is innacurate. That said, I have generally had the same experience here, but I use arch btw.

      • 4am@lemm.ee
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        Downvoting the arch meme? Are the Linux people grumpy today?

        • chingadera@lemmy.world
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          I just wanted to talk out of my ass here and drop a joke lol. I think it was the HC Linux people disagreeing that not all distro have gotten better. It was bs fluff for the meme lol

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    Also: I SET A FUCKING GROUP POLICY THAT DISABLES THE SEARCH BAR; WHY THEY FUCKING IGNORE IT???****

    because you dont own your pc. microfrost does

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      I am sure they just replaced the gpo with another one and accidentally forgot to carry over the setting.

      They new one is totally better though and will improve your experience. You should configure it.

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    More and more I am considering taking a vacation with the specific goal of migrating to Linux. I’ve got decades old workflows linked to certain programs and tools that I know for sure only exist in Windows, so I’ll likely have to still run it in a VM for those, but my system setup is just kinda the place I call home the most, yet my patience for all this nonsense is rapidly declining.

    • zzzz@lemmy.world
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      Do it, my friend. I took the leap ~5 years ago and have not once regretted it. You’re right, you have Wine and Windows VMs available, if need be. But, honestly, I bet you end up replacing those work flows with better ones within Linux before long.

      • AlteredStateBlob@kbin.social
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        I mean, I’d like to. But some of my work requires me to use stuff like Adobe products and I find it massively easier to keep up to date with what these tools can do, if I can just muck around in my private projects (I actually care about) and then transfer the knowledge to my work stuff. I’ll mull the idea some more time. Not really interested in dual booting at all, though that might be a solid solution, but windows simply deciding to kill everything else, even if its on a different disk entirely is not a prospect I relish.

        • stevecrox@kbin.social
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          If its for work I would suggest picking a “stable” distribution like Debian, Kubuntu or OpenSuse.

          A lot of people recommend Arch or Fedora but the focus of those is getting the very latest releases, which increases your chance of stuff breaking.

          A lot of people will suggest niche distributions, those can be great for specific needs but generally you will always find Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL support for commercial apps.

          I would also suggest looking at the KDE Desktop, many distributions default to Gnome but it is unique in how it works, KDE (or XFCE) will provide a desktop similar to Windows 11.

          Lastly I would suggest looking at Crossover Linux by Codeweavers.

          Linux has something called WINE, its an attempt to implement the Windows 95 - 11 API’s so windows applications can run on linux.

          WINE is how the Steam Deck/Linux is able to play Windows games. Valve embedded it into Steam and called it “Proton”.

          WINE is primarily developed by Codeweavers and they provide the Crossover application that makes setting up and running a Windows application really easy.

          People will mention Lutris but that has a far higher learning curve.

          There is an application database so you can see in advance if your applications would work: https://appdb.winehq.org/

          • AlteredStateBlob@kbin.social
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            Thanks for the long response. I was thinking Mint maybe, had some experience with it a few years ago. But it’d replace both my private and work stuff over, so some gaming, too (mainly through steam). Stability is key to me. My current Windows install hasn’t needed anything for 4 years or so, so I’m absolutely not going for Arch. I need this stuff daily, I cannot waste time trying to troubleshoot for hours or relying on backups, etc.

            • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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              Yeah I honestly wouldn’t use Arch or indeed any rolling release distro for any machine that’s used for revenue. Go with a stable release distro. Mint is one of the very few I even bother considering, there’s a reason it’s been as popular as it has for so long.

            • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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              I know it has a shitty “95-ish” look to it, but https://distrowatch.com/ is quite possibly your best resource in finding out at a glance which of the distros you’re interested in are stable or rolling, and how popular they are. Go down the page hit ranking on the right, and start clicking: you will see the root build of every distro, whether it’s stable or rolling, the last release date, links to reviews, etc.

              It won’t get you to your final decision, but it will get you to a shortlist. And then you can start making LiveUSB sticks to test drive your distros of choice in RAM without having to install anything. There are very few distros that require a full install to try out; if you run into one you can always use old hardware or a spare disk, etc. Mint has a LiveUSB of all its DE choices, Pop!OS has a LiveUSB, you just need the USB sticks and something like Rufus to make them with, and you’re ready to test drive.

              Well worth the trouble, IMO. Good luck.

            • stevecrox@kbin.social
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              Mint was a reaction to Gnome 3, the unique workflow upset a lot of people and the people behind Mint decided to build Cinnamon desktop (its Gnome 3 made to look/work like Gnome 2). They needed a distribution to build/test their work and so based a distribution off of Ubuntu and called it Mint.

              As a bit of explanation, there are only a few projects which attempt to build an entire linux distribution from scratch. This involves finding code from thousands of sources, work out packaging, etc… We call these ‘base’ distributions, Debian is the base distribution for Ubuntu, Ubuntu is the base distribution for Mint.

              Ubuntu tends to be slightly ahead of Debian in the software versions it uses and automatically enables the ‘non-free’ repositories. Ubuntu tends to push some Canonical specific things like Snaps (which everyone hates)

              I believe Mint rolls the Canonical specific things out of Ubuntu and you get the latest version of Cinnamon.

              Its all a bit…

          • PainInTheAES@lemmy.world
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            Just a heads up OpenSUSE is phasing out leap so it won’t have a stable release “soon” unless the things with ALP shake out well.

          • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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            As someone who is currently in the process of moving everything to Linux, this is a genuinely helpful comment. I have it saved now, lol. Thank you for taking the time to write this out, much appreciated.

        • Simbomba@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          There might not be a Linux native version of the adobe products available but theres a fun script that lets it run from what I experienced flawlessly on several distributions

        • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          windows simply deciding to kill everything else, even if its on a different disk entirely is not a prospect I relish.

          I’ve been dual booting for almost ten years and distro hopped a fair bit and never had that happen. Not once ever. I’ve screwed up my fair share of installs too. I think it’s one of those things that used to be a problem 20+ years ago, but is now basically a meme.

        • Anamana@feddit.de
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          I’m a fan of Linux, but my personal experience was filled with headaches on how to solve compability issues. It’s just a pain that some things don’t work as well as they used to with a clean windows install. So I traveled from Windows to Debian to Dualboot (win/debian) to Windows. And tbh I never looked back since then. Took too much time just to keep things running properly.

          If you depend on Adobe products I would at least opt for Dualboot if I were you. Otherwise you have no safe option to return to if things don’t seem to work out as you wished.

      • Sanity_in_Moderation@lemmy.world
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        I’m doing it. I build a new pc every 5 to 10 years. The new monster has posted. Need a few small cables before I really get started. I was going to put an older copy of win10 pro on it. But I’m going to take the Linux leap. The tower will be free of windows from day 1.

        Nobara simply because the author also wrote Proton, the Steam linux gateway. (Open to suggestions).

        All AMD.

        Gaming. Streaming. Internet. Video files. Voice recording. Occasional simple documents. That’s 99.99 percent of my usage.

        • uis@lemmy.world
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          I would suggest OpenSUSE Thumbleweed, but I did not use it for many years. And my current distro(Gentoo) isn’t well known as entry-level. Though for me personally it was.

          Also for gaming never use PulseAudio, lag is unbearable.

    • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
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      Best of luck. I can’t go back to windows any more. Well, I still dual boot for one game and the digital features of my national ID cause OF COURSE that software is windows only. 😒

      • hotbathenthusiast@mander.xyz
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        In case you didn’t know or haven’t tried yet: AusweisApp2 does exist for Linux. But I assume, like me, you tried unsuccessfully already. For me, the Linux drivers of my card reader don’t work…

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        I think we’re both German. My ID doesn’t have that yet, I dread the day where I can’t renew it without all that nonsense.

          • AlteredStateBlob@kbin.social
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            Germany introduced some digital ID functionality so you can do certain things online rather than having to go talk to someone in person, but that means that your ID isn’t just a card anymore but has some digital elements to it as well. And apparently the apps to use that stuff are Windows based.

    • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
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      But once you have tweaked things a bit, a new home is surprisingly quickly found. I mean, i know what you mean. But in the end, like or dislike boils down to a few basics and the rest accumulates over time.

    • torpak
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      I did the switch twenty years ago, starting with dual-boot and Wine. Nowadays dual-boot is gone and I never use Wine outside of gaming.

    • thepreciousboar@lemm.ee
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      You’ll be surprised how much you can do with wine and mono. But even so, switching and getting a vm is a viable option

    • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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      It would be nice if lemmy made it easy to create a community or such for every program and let people join to collect the necessary knowledge together.

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    I switched to Linux after this sort of tricks.

    They also will fuck with your “privacy and security settitings” on updates.

    If you try blocking search and start pinging home. It will make windows endleally spazz which causes stuttering in games.

    They forced me to switch to Linux pretty much

    Thanks satya microshit…

    Imagine treating a paying customer like this

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      One thing I did was go through hoops to disable the bing searches from the menu.

      Instead I should have switched to linux long ago.

      • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        If you buy a computer with Windows, you’re paying for it as a part of the price.

      • Uncle_Iroh@lemmy.world
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        People like you is why they do this shit in the first place. The entitlement of wanting products for free basically forces companies like Microsoft to become the huge advertisement pushing cunts that they are now.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          Nah, failure to enforce consumer protection and anti-trust law is why they do this shit in the first place. It doesn’t matter if you paid for it or not; even when you do pay, they exploit you anyway because they can.

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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            Yeah cars are one of the most expensive things you’re likely to buy, pull subscription bullshit, and spy on you like crazy, sometimes including your sex life. I pay about a gaming pc of cash upfront for my phone and still get spied on and advertised to by its os.

            And yeah I bought windows a year or so ago because I bought a new motherboard and needed an os and didn’t know linux was this good now. About a hundred bucks and it comes with all this bullshit that drove me to linux

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          Just to clarify. If you bought a device. The maker aka you paid a fee.

          Person above either using water market version or pirated it but more likely got it pre installed

          Either they don’t understand windows economics with that stupid “comment”

          • Hyperreality@kbin.social
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            Windows 10 was a free upgrade from 7/8. 7/8 was a free upgrade from XP. I mean, XP was installed on something, but I certainly haven’t paid for windows in decades.

            Apparently it’s still a thing:

            https://www.techspot.com/news/100334-microsoft-closes-windows-7-11-free-upgrade-loophole.html

            And if you think about it, why would private customers pay for windows, given it’s loaded with spyware? I’m already paying to use it with my data. No different than using google software.

            Sure, I prefer windows because I’m used to it and I’m lazy, but why pay for something that’s arguably inferior to open source software?

              • Hyperreality@kbin.social
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                You may be right. I seem to remember there being a free upgrade for the visually impaired, but I may be mistaken.

                In any case, I haven’t paid since I first bought this PC, which I’ve continually upgraded for over a decade. Ship of Theseus, basically. IRC because I never bought windows 10, and windows 7 (xp?) licenses weren’t tied to the system, I just used that the one time it asked me to verify my license.

                Seemed pretty obvious microsoft doesn’t actually care about individual users with custom built pcs. They make their money off desktop pc and laptop makers. That and increasingly advertising/data harvesting.

                • TheFerrango@lemmy.basedcount.com
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                  Must’ve been Win7. There were ways to upgrade certain 7 licenses to valid Win 8.x licenses (the infamous Windows 8.x with Media Center) that you could get if you had a viable Win7 license (anything except starter, basic and pro). Win 10 and 11 were free “upgrades” if you had a 7+ key

            • sadreality@kbin.social
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              If you think that “private customers” have not paid for it… There is not much to discuss here chief

        • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
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          They do it because of greed and the everlasting thirst of large companies to grow bigger and bigger.

          They literally gave Windows 10 and 11 away for free if you had Windows 7 or 8.

          Many if not most people pay for Windows in the form of licensing costs included in the price of a device, mainly laptops. Most laptops come with Windows preinstalled, and Microsoft earns with every laptop sold with Windows preinstalled. People building their own PC and getting an OEM key for cheap off of eBay or pasting a one-liner into PowerShell are the minority.

          Do you really expect people to go out of their way to purchase a retail Windows license when they already have a perfectly valid and activated version of Windows preinstalled on their device?

          And now that Windows 10/11 is a nice mix of adware, bloatware, nagware and spyware, do you really think it’s worth $199 (for the “Pro” version)?

          It’s a business model Microsoft deliberately chose. Guess what? They were doing just fine before doing what they do now, despite of a few “software pirates”.

          I’d happily pay even a subscription fee for Windows if Microsoft didn’t try to shove their crap down my throat every chance they get.

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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            I wouldn’t pay a subscription fee for windows without the bullshit, but that’s partly due to the value of their competition. Without the bullshit though I’d likely be ok with buying a new version every major pc upgrade or if the new edition offered a serious value improvement. Otherwise I’d hold on until such a situation. The move from 10 to 11 was whatever until I got the ads. I’d also probably consider linux every time I have to pay to upgrade. But their bullshit converted me to give it a second chance and I won’t go back. Linux happens to stand on its own merit now.

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    I switched to Linux when the “We’ve scheduled your free update to Windows 10!”-like popup started appearing again and again on my Win7 machine even though I disabled it. I didn’t like not having a choice and they only got worse from there. Meanwhile, you have full control over every part of a Linux system. You can even uninstall the update manager if you feel like it.

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      They’re getting there with windows 11… first it was ‘hey you’re compatible with windows 11’ now they’ve stepped up to a full screen non-skippable screen a big ‘upgrade to windows 11’ but still with a button to stay on windows 10 hidden in the corner. It’s only a matter of time before that button disappears.

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        I tried the Win11 compatibility app once, it said i wasn’t compatible due to some BIOS settings I needed to change. Nah, I’m good, and it hasn’t bugged me to upgrade since.

        • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk
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          I made mine deliberately incompatible by disabling the fTPM but started getting the upgrade prompts recently.

      • Katana314@lemmy.world
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        I’m almost glad my current hardware doesn’t support Windows 11. No matter how much it tries, it can’t force me to have different hardware.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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          I remember a lot of folks waking up one day to find their system had borked itself overnight installing Win 10 without their permission. It doesn’t matter to Microsoft if it’ll actually work.

    • addie@feddit.uk
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      Remove the update manager? Remove the bootloader and all kernels if you want to - you might if you’re preparing a container image, it won’t stop you. Remove glibc and init? Fine, if that’s what you want - might have no need for those if you’re prepping it up for embedded.

      The price of having a computer that does exactly what it’s told is that you have to know what to tell it. But that’s well worth while.

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      And when you feel really adventurous….

      You can delete the kernel….

      Everybody does it at least once, just to see. Usually it’s just to see. MS support reps still learning the power of grep …. “Where are the backups” is both a question you want to hear … and really don’t want to hear. (At the start, it says they’re… at least thorough… an hour to the end of the patch window… not so much.)

  • TalesFromTheKitchen@lemmy.ml
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    Same with ‘compatibility telemetry runner’ after every update I have to disable it and delete the .exe from system32. None of the permanently disable tricks work. Plus I always have to run “oo shutup” to disable the other privacy stuff. I wish I could switch to another is, but most of my software is windows only.

      • TalesFromTheKitchen@lemmy.ml
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        Yeah I’ve heard Wine has gotten really decent. Maybe I should give it a shot. Change is always a bit hard, when it comes to habits.

        • silly goose meekah@lemmy.world
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          absolutely agree on that last part. but yeah, apparently valve really accelerated the development of those translation layers for the steam deck.

          • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi
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            For regular gaming experiences, WINE and Proton are brilliant. For some .NET stuff it’s still lacking. On WINE, MusicBee for example lacks proper CJK font redirection and dragging the tabs on it causes MusicBee to throw errors. You might also run into issues gaming if you have certain setups + controllers too.

            • dan@upvote.au
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              For some .NET stuff it’s still lacking.

              .NET runs natively on Linux now. so newer apps should work fine unless they’re using Windows-specific APIs. For the legacy .NET Framework 4.x, they should work in Mono.

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              .NET stuff

              Have you tried using mono? It does winforms by now though apps doing direct Win32 API calls (bypassing the actual .NET stuff) are iffy no matter what.

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      Could it be possible to place a read-only dummy .exe in its place? I think FS attributes should be respected by the update process.

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        They ought to be. You might have to change ownership of the file to some other local user (and disable permission inheritance for that file so admin can’t touch it), but I bet this would work for most use cases except like a system restore.

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    But don’t you want to have what I’ve come to enjoy: Printer roulette?

    Win, “printer”, enter…come on Printer and Scanner control panel, baby wants a new printer queue to kill that stuck job…dammit edge, no I don’t want to search bing for an inkjet.

    Win, “printer”…, enter…come on Control Panel, you can do it…HP Smart Panel, you piece of crap

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    Windows, on my work computer, decided Monday morning was a good time to turn my default pdf reader to Microsoft Edging. Turns out you can’t delete Edging from add or remove programs.

    • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOP
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      ah i got that too!! I thought it was because monday i updated foxit reader and then for some reason it gave back the default to edge! Instead it was edge that took it back by force without my consent!

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        foxit reader

        That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. I didn’t realise it was still around!

        • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOP
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          i’m up to using any alternative that isn’t adobe or edge as my default :)

          I tried sumatrapdf but while was extremely fast to start, it was too “simple” for me, i need better printing support

          i don’t really like foxit reader, they try to push a demo install of the pro version on each update

            • uis@lemmy.world
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              Doesn’t Okular depend on KDE Frameworks? Didn’t know they can run on Шindows.

            • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOP
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              nice program but it has the print dialog from win95 :( (understandably, because it’s mainly a ported linux program), i need something like “booklet”, a preview because auto portrait/landscape is always conflicting with the print driver and zoom/adapt

    • Donut@leminal.space
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      Search for ‘change default apps’ and move it back to your favorite program, or right click the pdf -> properties -> change program

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        Thanks but I fixed it. I do appreciate you mentioning this in case others encounter it.

        Just you know, I shouldn’t have to do it. I don’t need Microsoft to help me with edging.

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    Welcome to Windows update. Where they revert any settings you make to the OS that won’t benefit them.

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    really looking forward to getting another SSD and just installing linux on it so I don’t have to deal with that kind of bullshit anymore. The bullshit I will be dealing with will not be privacy related, just compatibility related.

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    When using Microsoft products and accepting their incomprehensible terms and conditions, you have no say and your opinion doesn’t matter.

    Group policy doesn’t matter, domain administrator, GPO rules, all of it- none of it matters.

    You’ll get dogshit and you will like it. (Friendly reminder that it was extremely overpriced also) That’s the tax you pay for being in their horrible, horrible “ecosystem” from hell. Enjoy! Grease up or take it dry, you’re “taking it” either way.

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    Let’s also not forget the update also installed fucking edge again even with registry keys telling it not to. Fuck Microsoft.