Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron
arstechnica.com
Op-ed: PC makers used to need to bring their own add-on bloatware—no longer.
  •  conditional_soup   ( @conditional_soup@lemm.ee ) 
    27•1 year ago

    The only thing holding me back from diving headlong into Linux is gaming support. I’ve been a windows user since W98. XP was the shit, 7 was rock solid, ten was pretty good, but it seems like Microsoft is dead set on speedrunning enshittification with 11.

    •  Dandroid   ( @dandroid@dandroid.app ) 
      45•1 year ago

      Gaming support on Linux is the best it has ever been. Other than select games, nearly everything works now. It’s mostly competitive multiplayer games that don’t work because it’s the kernel anticheat that is the issue. Notably, Call of Duty and Destiny 2 don’t work. Halo does 100% work now, which is awesome. But if you mostly play single player games, you are probably totally fine.

    •  thisbenzingring   ( @thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
      12•1 year ago

      The only games that don’t work with a Linux solution are games that the developers have purposely done something that makes it not work.

      Check out https://www.protondb.com/ Some games might require a little tinkering. The Vulkan api will win the graphics war because Microsoft hasn’t done much with DirectX and DX12 is not doing very well supporting the features it claims it can while being difficult to program. It’s only a matter of time before Windows loses it’s hold on the desktop. And Microsoft doesn’t seem to really care. They make their API for Azure work with Linux.

      •  Amju Wolf   ( @amju_wolf@pawb.social ) English
        3•1 year ago

        VR gaming is also shit on Linux. Mostly because it (similarly to Linux gaming in general) adds a layer of complexity and oddness you sometimes need to fix or debug… When you layer these kind of things the issues and complexity tend to multiply.

  •  argv_minus_one   ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 
    8•1 year ago

    Computer manufacturers often distributed buggy, pointless, or redundant third-party software (“bloatware” or “crapware”) to help subsidize the cost of the hardware.

    To make more profit for the manufacturer, I think you mean. Until the cryptocurrency scammers came along and started stripping store shelves bare, you could build a computer from parts, it’d be cheaper than buying a pre-built computer, and it would be free of crapware.

  •  AutoTL;DR   ( @autotldr@lemmings.world ) BEnglish
    7•1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    For a certain kind of computer buyer, the first thing you always did with a new laptop or desktop from a company like Dell, HP, Acer, or Asus wasn’t to open the box and start using it.

    Computer manufacturers often distributed buggy, pointless, or redundant third-party software (“bloatware” or “crapware”) to help subsidize the cost of the hardware.

    This might pass some savings on to the user, but once they owned their computer, that software mainly existed to consume disk space and RAM, something that cheaper PCs could rarely afford to spare.

    Computer manufacturers also installed all kinds of additional support software, registration screens, and other things that generally extended the setup process and junked up your Start menu and desktop.

    The “out-of-box experience” (OOBE, in Microsoft parlance) for Windows 7 walked users through the process of creating a local user account, naming their computer, entering a product key, creating a “Homegroup” (a since-discontinued local file and media sharing mechanism), and determining how Windows Update worked.

    Due to the Microsoft Store, you’ll find several third-party apps taking up a ton of space in your Start menu by default, even if they aren’t technically downloaded and installed until you run them for the first time.

    The original article contains 596 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!