I’m a teacher and our division just “upgraded” to W11 with a new version of outlook that is basically a web app on desktop. Several times a day my laptop comes to a complete crawl while Teams decides to open itself. Can’t open or close programs, Firefox won’t register mouse clicks, nothing. Graphical glitches appear al the time with menu bars and task bars disappearing regularly, requiring force quitting the app or logging out of the desktop.
When I first switched to Linux I assumed my experience would be like this. But now it’s the other way around.
Rant over.
What a big pile of shit software, I swear I’m just gonna quit because of this ass smelling garbage.
Today I discovered that C:/Users/MyUser was silently an alias of C:/Users/OneDriveBullshit/MyUser only in the explorer. So I just figured out why some documents were often disappearing for months, I’m just working on a multiverse were depending on the application the same path don’t lead to the same folder.
Earlier this week I unzipped a file and couldn’t remove resulting files without administrator privileges.
I’ve never lost so much time for any fucking software, let alone a paid one. And don’t even get me starting on the fucking ads they put everywhere even if you unchecked the 154 options in 42 different menus.
Also, I don’t get how people just accept that any input they perform will require an average of 1s for feedback.
But at least now I understand why macs are so popular…
This is the thing I hate most about windows. Did it register the thing I clicked? Is something happening? If I click again will it do the task twice? Complete opposite of how my Mac works.
I also experienced less “hiccups” since switching to Linux with KDE but I’d like to know on what combination of hardware and Windows you experienced anywhere close to an average of 1s response time to “any input”.
It’s a ~5 years old thinkpad. It may be due to it not being well managed but it really disn’t up to the task. Being in a Teams call while using an external displays makes the framerate drop to ~10fps for example 🤷
That’s mostly down to Teams though (being the bloated web app that it is), and not the underlying operating system.
I think, it’s both.
right clicking on anything takes closer to a second on our school machines… on 10th gen i7…
My current company just got bought out earlier this year, we are in the process of rolling all our stuff into their IT infrastructure.
I was lucky enough to get to use Debian as my OS on my old company laptop because I was the only IT at this company. Last week they finally issued me my new corporate laptop, which of course is Windows because the company that bought us out is a 100% Microsoft house.
One of their sys admins was on a call with me to get the laptop set up and working on their VPN, MFA enrollment, it was supposed to be a “quick 15 minute call.”
I watched him as he fought remotely with my machine for almost an hour. The VPN wouldn’t work no matter what he tried, then the GUI started acting up, then RDP wasn’t working right, then MFA wasn’t working. This was a brand new installation from their golden image too on a brand new high end laptop.
After about 20 minutes, I told him I was gunna stay on the call muted and to just let me know when everything was working properly. Then I hopped back onto my Linux laptop and spent the rest of the call getting actual work done while their new Windows machine was pooping the bed.
He didn’t actually even get it working at the end of the hour lol. He had to remote in later that evening to finish doing a bunch of registry fixes and file purges to finally get the VPN to connect.
Wow thank you I needed that.
Earlier this week I unzipped a file and couldn’t remove resulting files without administrator privileges.
To be fair, this kind of stuff happened to me when I first switched to Linux, before I got a better grasp on file permissions.
Yeah I can totally see that happening 🫣
Here it was especially infuriating because it’s mixed with all the company policies, like the 1 month process it took me to have administrator privilege in the first place.
These process also make some sense as I’m in a company of several hundred thousand employees, but all of this mixed together is exhaustingly anoying.
Wow, you just… described the problem we had on our Windows PCs that I never managed to describe
My experience exactly. My current company is rolling out new W11 laptops as the old ones age out.
I’m consistently amazed at how poorly Windows 11 runs on these brand new, $1500 enterprise grade machines. They all have the latest Intel i7 chips, 16GB of DDR5 memory, Nvme 1TB drives, 1440p beautiful screens, and they perform like ass.
Constant lockups, stuttering, slow to wake up, slow to open programs, the fans constantly spin up super loud with almost nothing running in the foreground.
I see frequent GUI glitches and bugs, literally had the WiFi stop working on one yesterday, just wouldn’t connect to anything and the tray app wouldn’t pop up when clicked. Had to restart the whole computer and log in again to get it to connect.
Meanwhile, the 11 year old retired desktops that I repurposed for internal company resources like Open Project, Uptime Kuma, and Ansible are running plain old Debian with KDE Plasma and are rock solid. They never crash, never freeze up, are always super responsive, and are fast to update. The longest one of them has taken to update was maybe 3 minutes?
Windows on the other hand… Lets just say there’s a reason I push updates at the end of the day.
Vista all over again?
Worse, Vista you could wrestle into submission, Windows11 is so deeply embedded with ads, spyware, bloat, and spaghetti code, it’s almost impossible to get it clean.
And even when you do, you have to constantly fight to keep it that way. The fact that Windows will change your settings for default apps and privacy preferences without your permission after a major update is absolutely insane and disgusting.
I shouldn’t have to constantly be on guard for my OS Which I paid $200 for professional licensing to just sneak its own preferences and settings back to what it wants.
Microsoft is due a terrible release, 7, 8, & 10 were all above average.
What are you talking about, Windows 8 was a complete shitshow. It wasn’t until 8.1 that it became respectable.
I think Win 8 was a YMMV release. I used it heavily for work, (CAD/CAM) and it ran very well. With no more issues than one expects to get from /windows.
I stopped after 7 🤷
The last week 10 was an easy, free upgrade, I upgraded then gave the machine to a friend to do some very, very early LLM training to never see it again.
XP had a bunch of problems early on, just like 8. The hate for 8 was mostly because of ui changes. Me and 95 were irredeemably bad.
Yeah no, the experience really is ass.
We use Lenovo IdeaPads at work, a model with an i7 and a Nvidia GPU, and Windows constantly chugs and has weird UI issues, even though the machines are not running heavy software and are on a pretty fresh install.-
Sometimes when I wake the laptop from sleep, it sits and the lock screen showing my wallpaper and NOTHING else.
Clicking, typing does nothing, I just have to sit there and wait like 2 minutes until it finally decides to show the input field and let me login again. -
The Network/Sound/Battery tray flyout frequently stops responding. Only goes back to normal after restarting explorer.exe
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The internal display has scaling while the external doesn’t. So every time you drag a window across it “snags” in between them while the application flickers and struggles to switch the scaling.
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Switching between virtual desktops is so sloooow, if you use a different wallpaper on each you can literally see Windows struggling to swap the wallpapers in time.
It’s impressive how a native OS feature feels like a third-party kludge.
Great work Microsoft.
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We have Linux workstations at work…and these can only be used to access a remote desktop of a Windows 10 virtual machine. 👍
My boss told me to get a laptop and I’d be reimbursed, so I got a System76 with Fedora. “How are you going to use (company proprietary software that only works on Windows)?” I told him I could run it on wine (and I have). But he ended up assigning me a Windows 365 cloud, so now I have a very nice laptop that just works, and I only fire up the cloud crap if I really need to.
Suffice it to say that I’m the only upper management member that barely interacts with the IT department, I don’t need to 🤣🤣
As an admin who manages windows devices, it’s not only a pain for the end users. I will readily admit that the management tools are quite extensive and somewhat easy to use, but they’re damn near impossible to debug when they don’t work, and that’s quite often. Gpo’s often refuse to apply without reason, those ads on the Lock Screen? You can remove those if you pay for enterprise or education edition. Running pro? Nope you get ads.
Heres a programming (merge sort?) trick applied to troubleshooting GPOs: turn off half the policies in the GP, did the issue go away? if yes its in the turned off half, if no, turn off another half of the active policies, repeat
TL; DR
My experience between Windows and Linux is not much different with how often I have issues. But given the choice I much more prefer my Linux experience.I hate Windows just as much as the next guy, but this comment section smells a little of confirmation bias.
From my experiece (web dev in a mainly MS branded stack) Windows mostly just works. Yes there are horrendous design, UX choices forced upon me, but I can usually force the OS to do what I need and how I need it.
Now comparing it to my home Pop setup it also mostly just works. There are occasional freezes that require a restart and such, but I wouldn’t say it’s much more different from Windows.
Now what does differ a lot is that I don’t need to fight the OS to do shit. It’s way better productivitywise, when I know what I’m doing. Which is deffinetly not the case everytime.
That last paragraph is exactly what i feel. In Windows it started to feel more and more like I’m fighting against Microsoft and have to be on edge all the time whereas if in Linux something doesn’t work it’s not because of ill intentions of the people behind the OS.
I have to use SharePoint on a daily basis.
We pray for you
You’re fucked.
@maxprime same lol. Somehow the whole os feels like one gigantic advertisement… That is trying it’s best to not let you use your computer
My main gripe with windows is that it’s gradually turning to adware/spyware after MS decided to go for that sweet data collection revenue. That also means a shift in the focus of the development of the OS, as it’s not being developed for the benefit of the users anymore.
That, and software development processed are more tedious. Although today I’m sure I could find a workflow that works with WSL or vcpkg.
Edit: Oh, and everything turning to webapps on the desktop. Love staring at white canvas while it waits for a server response.
Gradually? By 10’s launch, it was already adware/spyware. 11 is not even attempting to hide it, if you look at it objectively past the PR.
Yeah, fair enough. I’ve just noticed that a clean setup requires more and more workarounds in regedit and policy editor etc. Updates reenabling stuff like that is just infuriating
We’re being forced to move everyone to W11 by the end of the year. It’s gonna be hell.
As someone who has a good windows laptop at home, windows at work is actual garbage. We had a month where you just couldn’t use the search function, because the act of typing in the search bar caused enough problems it would close the search bar.
Odds are your home computer is somewhat competent and your work one is a steaming pile of trash not fit for purpose.
I ran arch on it for about a year - it’s a gen 9 i5. During that time I had a desktop that ran W10 on a gen 3 i5 and was quite a competent machine. Then with W11 and the TPM requirement that perfectly good windows box became ewaste.
The laptop is fine. Windows 11 is just garbage.
I spend a lot of my workday looking at windows that have turned white and “not responding”, or clicking on things and waiting a minute to see whether the click worked, or waiting for the Start menu to allow me to type, or waiting for the indexing service to spare me a little bit of my computer for my own use, etc. Then I come home to Linux and remember how computers can actually be fast and satisfying to use.
Oh W11 start menu is so damn slow… I usuall smash Win and then immediately start typing the Application I need. After the Windows 11 upgrade, the menu chokes on the first two letters leaving me with having to redo everything slowly.
I feel the same way about having to use Mac for work and going back to a Linux PC at the end of the day. God damn I hate Mac’s UX. From the entire UI, to the CMD key, to the fact that END functions as PGDN and goes to and of page instead of end of line.
It’s bad enough when I have to use a keyboard that moves the pg up/pg dn/home/end keys around. That would absolutely kill my productivity so I’m glad I don’t have to use macs.
It is basically http://mail.office365.com in an electron shell. I’m pretty sure all the non ‘classic’ apps are this way now. I’m currently trying out Thunderbird to see if I like it.
Personally I’ve been using outlook via pwa for months anyway
If they’re gonna put it in an electron container anyway you be may as well cut out the middleman and just use the web app Microsoft’s ones are actually quite good now
Yeah my org is about to ban using anything but the outlook client for email access for “security” reasons, and ban all other logins. We’re on a Kubernetes cluster, so historically you’ve been able to login via Thunderbird or use the Gmail web interface as well.
If they go through with it I will riot.
When teams is just doing chat things, it’s fine. But the fact that it’s the only program that doesn’t remember which monitor it is supposed to be on, and never remembers the show on all desktop settings, drives me insane. Not to mention that it seems to restart itself multiple time per day and makes me fix its location each time.
This is why I insisted to not have two monitors on my work desk. I don’t use it because it introduces so much more problems.
1 out of many problems less I have to worry about on Win11.
Btw., virtual desktop switching on Win11 is very slow. It needs time to register an then finally starts a stuttering transistion to the next desktop. This laptop has a 3 year old i7 in it. Switching virtual desktops on Gnome would run very smooth and responsive on it. I tested it even with VirtualBox with that Win11 as a host OS and GPU acceleration enabled: smoother! Only minor lags.
Oh yeah, I have noticed that the virtual desktop switching on windows 11 sucks. It’s extra shitty if you set a different wallpaper for each one.
I am glad that I’ve set only a solid color. <_<