I don't really like Windows but it's for my gaming PC. My laptop does run linux. I don't know much of anything about 11 and whether it's better or not.
It's such a subjective question. As a result, the answers you get will confuse you even more. It really depends on what type of user you are, and what software and hardware you have. Most basic users will notice some graphical changes, but not much else. I am not one of these people and use my desktop for everything from gaming, writing, music, and drawing. I am perfectly happy with 11 over 10. Yes, it has little annoyances, but then every version of Windows does. Those saying version X was great, are simply wearing those rose-tinted glasses. The perfect operating system does not exist, simply because us users are such a varied bunch. So catering to us all at once will create friction and issues.
The simple answer is, if you're going to stick with Windows rather than move to Linux, then upgrade. You will have to do it at some point. So long as you don't do it within the first six months of the new version of Windows being released. Then you will be fine. The later you leave it, the less time you have to become comfortable with it before you ask this question again about the next upgraded version of Windows.
Those saying version X was great, are simply wearing those rose-tinted glasses. The perfect operating system does not exist, simply because us users are such a varied bunch. So catering to us all at once will create friction and issues.
The simple answer is, if you're going to stick with Windows rather than move to Linux, then upgrade.
This accurately summarizes my thoughts on the issue. If you want Windows, just go for 11.
Last time I used 11 it had a few things which are deal breakers for me.
All windows of same application are grouped. In 10, you can have it group them never or only when task bar is full. On 11 you have no option. It takes an extra click every time you want to cycle to a specific window.
Seconds on the clock are gone. I use that on 10 occasionally and want it back.
Context menu in explorer was changed and is way more frustrating to use. My biggest gripe is the keyboard shortcuts were changed for no reason.
The ribbon menu is going away for nested menu system. Ribbon is objectively better for repeating multiple commands.
Gaming performance is worse, specifically VR.
UI/UX changes, some are good, some are bad. It’s not a polished OS with inconsistencies everywhere. In 10 at least they tried to make each level of the UI consistent with itself. 11 is just a hodgepodge of useless shit.
For me it was a nice improvement. I liked the new window snapping feature that allows to you quickly snap an application to half or a quarter of your screen. But honestly there aren’t that many differences compared to my work laptop on Windows 10, I never regretted updating though.
I also used Linux for gaming, most of the time you will be able to get things to work. But sometimes you will have small issues in games and way worse support from the developers.
I upgraded 10 to 11 and really liked it. Problem with linux is all the commandline if you want to do advanced stuff.
Then i got a gpt-4 subscription and installed arch linux with hyperland. I aint looking back, everytime i use a windows system now it feels slow and prehistoric… sometimes though you get some weird problem you just don’t wanna deal with at the time and then its briefly booting into windows again.
Lutris does pretty much all the main game stores. GOG, Steam, Uplay, EAOrigin, Epic. IIRC they also have custom wine scripts to install with recommended settings so you almost always have the best config out of the box.
There’s also Heroic, which only does GOG and Epic, but is a bit cleaner and easier to use.
@lemon@webghost0101 You can even achieve that with just #Wine. I carefully set up my Wine on my two devices with #DXVK on one and #GalliumNine on the other. Took a while, to be honest.
But now, together with wine-binfmt and icoutils, I can just double-click any #Windows game. 🍷
@webghost0101 I just want to say that vanilla Wine (weird flavour, but ok) can already run a lot of games fine if you install DXVK. It saves you the trouble of keeping seperate versions for everything.
Thats why you enable the telemetry thing in the motherboard for the installation only and prolly disable it afterwards :p no warning errors, no fuss. Works. Shows how shit it is that they require it.
There are ways to block and circumvent that too. Ive once ran an emiliorated setup but that had its own problems.
You clould analyze all your internet packages and whitelist only the data you explicitly chose to send to the net. But i have to admit i am unlikely to go so far, i have actually loosened my privacy focus quite alot since i am simping for the copilot ai powertools. There almost dreamlike in what they can mean for my job and i want to be ahead of the curve in learning how to use em which means enabling insider previews and such. I even regularly use bing now even if its classic search is still crap. I though i was done with chromium before.
I guess its a good thing my main system is now linux and windows is just a backup and job os. Whatever data is left they can have it.
If i cant trust my bios to actually disable certain features when i disable them there then i might aswell worry that they installed a secret kernel acces mini os that spys on any os i might use.
Doing a quick google to find info about Platform Security Processor states that if you cant find the security processor section on the device security screen it means tpm is disabled. This does lead me to believe that disabling TPM at least disables windows acces to the security processor, windows cant directly use features i have directly disabled in the bios at least not without that acces.
Or how far does this rabbit hole go exactly? I cant trow every windows device out il have to change job and my wife be pissed.
If you mean the TPM, that's not for telemetry, it's for security. It does still have some implications you might not enjoy though - IF you use bitlocker on Windows AND have TPM enabled, I believe you can't move your drive to another device because it requires the original device's TPM for decryption (and no, you can't just swap out a TPM module either - it won't be the considered the same device). That's about all you need to fear from the TPM.
All the windows telemetry stuff is in Windows settings. And of course there's some you can't disable in windows settings either, but there's scripts for stuff and you can run pihole and block every non-essential microsoft domain.
The way it was explained to me was that TPM allows windows to get a unique identifier for your motherboard which is supposedly similary to how nvidia identifies users for telemetry with gpus. But i digress i am not an expert on these particular kinds of tech.
Why would windows make it mandatory if its only required for an optional feature?
Your motherboard already has a unique identifier, as does your CPU, your GPU, and I believe your RAM too. It's how their licensing system can tell when your existing Windows install has been transferred to another set of hardware You can overwrite data on your motherboard, but it's like 0.0001% of users who'd do that, so Microsoft doesn't care.
Now, it's possible there are errors in what I'm saying next, I'm not an expert. But here's how I understand it.
TPM allows Windows to make sure it's still on the exact same machine it was on before, for sure. No trickery. So if you lock your drive with Bitlocker using TPM, it's not possible to just clone your drive and try to unlock in another machine. Any data theft requires the user to have possession of the exact machine you configured it on, in addition to your Windows/Microsoft password. And if someone does something funky with your motherboard firmware, you can't unlock the drive either, because it's no longer the same trusted one. At the same time, a legitimate firmware update from the manufacturer can screw things up too if they're negligent about it. I believe Bitlocker has recovery keys for occasions such as this.
It's also a sort of a secure key storage I believe, so things like Windows Hello facial recognition use it (Apple similarly uses T2 for touch ID on modern macs, but since touch ID came before T2, I'm not sure what they used before).
Basically it has security features, some of them allow for comfort features, some for stuff you don't need too much as a regular joe, but Microsoft is enforcing better security defaults like this because there are ridiculously obscure threats out there and they don't want to be known as "the operating system that gets the most viruses" anymore. Windows is already the only operating system you need to pay money for (MacOS licenses are technically free, but you do need the hardware, so there's still a cost to be fair), but it's also got the reputation for being the least secure historically (no longer such a clear cut case, thanks to the work they've been putting in, for an example, Microsoft Defender is actually pretty decent).
Oh I absolutely understand there are proper usecases for TPM like all our work laptops have bit locker enabled. But my personal device is a Diy desktop of Theseus that doesnt leave my house and it doesn’t really have all that much sensitive data anyway. My main issue with tracking/identifiers/telemetry is they use it to serve ads tailored to my behaviors they learned from the data they verified from me using those same identifiers. I am something of an anti-advertisement extremist for psychological reasons. There designed to get in my head and physically hurt.
That's a side effect of your device being more secure, yes. After all, the most secure device is a simple rock. Nobody can hack it and it can't rip Marvel movies off Disney+.
To be clear, Microsoft doesn't give a single fuck about you doing piracy, they actually need your device to be secure because otherwise you might switch to another OS for security. Disney and the like, however, will likely in the future require you to use a TPM2 device for advanced DRM.
Of course, if this is something you're rightly worried about, the right course of action isn't to install Windows and disable TPM (which also, as I said, does nothing for disabling Telemetry). It's to install a Linux distro that's hopefully not Ubuntu, because that's way too commercial and not free enough.
Also, at the moment, the Linux desktop install base is small enough that any streaming service can just disable their services for Linux users altogether, TPM or not. So we do actually need to be voting with our OS installs and sooner rather than later.
What does it mean to be secure? Allowing a megacorp to mandate what you can and can't do on your own hardware means that hardware is less secure, not more.
It disallows certain attacks other people could perform on your devices. I've already explained this in 2 other comments in this thread.
Firstly, even with physical access to your device, it'll be harder to fuck with the firmware or software on your computer. Windows literally can't unlock your data if something's fucky, because TPM won't give it the required keys. Secondly, TPM can be used as a more secure way to store encryption keys in general. And thirdly, you get hardware random number generation, which can be very useful if your system's entropy is too low.
Yes, unfortunately it also means DRMs can force you to consume content on only the exact same hardware you purchased it for. But there ARE legitimate use cases for TPM too. TPM has been used in enterprise settings for over a decade.
Luckily for now at least, there's a solution for the whole DRM issue too. It's called piracy. Plenty of DRM free content out there. It's possible that some streaming content literally won't reach your favourite torrent site because hardware DRM, but I'm not TOO worried about it personally, because HDCP can be bypassed, so there's still a way to capture the signal, it's just between the computer and the screen.
But overall, definitely use Linux instead of Windows with TPM off if you're worried about ANY of this. And I mean, sure, keep TPM off, it's highly unlikely that you'll actually need the niche extra security it provides on a personal device.
The only one with physical access to my hardware trying to fuck with the software is me. Evil maid attacks are purely hypothetical for almost everyone, and suggesting that TPM is necessary to protect against them is dishonest. TPM is a much greater threat than any it purports to protect against.
The problem was the specialized software from samsung to sideload jellyfin on my tv not working properly but i second that timeshift is not a luxery on these kind of systems. If i only need windows now and then for sm specialized then thats ok, hope to move windows into just a vm soon.
I have to admit, I still have a windows partition, but I honestly haven't booted into it for a full year now. The only thing I can think of needing it for, is firmware updates to my logitech peripherals, but that's something I can live without.
There will always be something that will only work on windows, but that list is getting short enough now that the number of people it's a problem for has begun to shrink, too.
“ but that list is getting short enough now that the number of people it’s a problem for has begun to shrink, too.” this was also my mates take who got me who introduced me to arch/hyprland. The progress in just one year is amazing and i wonder how much gpt-powered devs are responsible for that acceleration.
No no, you read my comment wrong. I used to complain about the cli and lack of gui while trying ubuntu.. with a gui.
I am loving my arch setup. And i aint changing soon. Even if really its gpt-4 being a massive mvp to tell me how to do stuff.
Its wasnt as much the cli stuff or any of the advanced stuff i wanted that was the problem but just that my autistic ass needed some easy/good accessible help to learn it in a way schools,google and youtube never could. Commandline is fun now and i look forward to seeing the random pokemon i get every time.
Ah I see! I missed the 'then' part and assumed you're describing the setup you're complaining about.
What version of Ubuntu were you using? While I have felt like this in the past, it's been improving more and more to a point I could configure all I need without CLI (selection of toolset does come a long way).
Not sure but it was a desktop version with a gui. This was on my dedicated server so not my main machine that i switched to arch. I've actually went to completely remove that ubuntu which was a mess from my own misdoings and experiments and started from scratch with the last LTS version of linux-server, fully in commandline. In less then a weekend i restored all the initial functionality, fixed the previously broken functionality and added some extra features to it. But again the moment i dont know how to do something i am skipping google straight for the AI genie.
All too familiar. I've been using Linux for years now but still keep a drive with Windows 10 just to use Photoshop from time to time. I really tried to migrate over to GIMP and Krita and they are amaizing tools for 80% of what I need them, but they are still not on the same level as Photoshop sadly.
I even bought an Affinity license to see if I could at least get out from under Adobe's greasy thumb, but a huge part of my work is restoring vintage illustrations, which means I need to be able to set the White Point of a given image to shift colors away from yellowed paper.
Affinity does not have the ability to set White Point. So I checked the forums and found this: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/10589-set-white-point-photoshop-style/ — this was posted 8 years ago, and still absolutely nothing from the Affinity devs. Since I figured out I couldn't do White Point, I haven't opened Affinity again, not even once. Money down the drain.
Meanwhile, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign just keep getting slower, and more bloated, and slower, and more bloated, and... repeat ad infinitum 🤢
Hyperland is a windows manager yes because i have cognitive challenges that require visual sorting of information.
What i gain? Super sayan levels of fast. Productivity goes brrr. Completely customizable (really into that) and it looks and feels sweet AF. This is with the hyperdot configuration found here, check out the vid. https://github.com/prasanthrangan/hyprdots
GPT-4: it knows linux much much better then i do. I have no api so i cant just give the command box but stuff like: “provide easy to follow instructions and commands to set up x, y, z” wielded me way better result then trying the same stuff alone in linux before. I completely redid a server project i worked for more then a year on in less then a weekend. I also use it as a command cheatsheet because i suck at remembering commands and the answers on google are burried Between ads.
Photoshop: This was a worry of myself aswell, a friend send me this “https://github.com/Gictorbit/photoshopCClinux“ Havent tried yet but its not the only option either. As i said elsewhere you can often straight up run windows installed exes from a different drive using lutrius and proton.
I am gonna need to checkout Magnet and Raycast. They seem very promising for my job where i can only use Windows.
Replying to this not because I believe you'll need to know, but because others might see your comment and wonder...
Anyone can get a GPT 3.5 API key now, you don't need to have a subscription.
This coupled with sgpt gives a nice command line interface to GPT, and a way to get GPT to generate the right (sometimes, anyway) shell commands for what you want to do. I use alias ask="sgpt --chat temp " to give me the ability to ask general one-line questions from GPT, or you can use ask --shell and it'll ask about a shell command, then offer to execute it after showing you the command generated.
This is the answer. I didn't even bother fixing my windows install since I migrated my gaming PC to Garuda Linux. Everything I need works without a hitch.
As long as you don't mind the task bar being glued to the bottom of your screen, I think Windows 11 is a net improvement over 10. The new features in WSL are particularly cool.
personally I like a windows 11 for my main gaming focused desktop and arch linux with KDE for my laptop windows 10 just feels like a less finished windows 11 to me now
Windows 11 is supported longer and will receive patches for longer than Windows 10. In fact, I believe Windows 10 is only supported for a few more years. To ensure that you do not have an unpatched (therefore insecure) operating system on the internet, you will either migrate to a newer version of Windows or to a different operating system eventually.
That all being said, Windows 11 was commonly referred to as being faster than Windows 10 on the same hardware. The largest gripes are that Windows 11 has very strict system requirements (therefore not officially working on most computers) and that Windows 11 has a different user interface (taking away some things people like). Windows 10 or 11 are operating systems which basically need to be installed on an SSD so be sure to consider upgrading to that if you have not done so already.
I'm pretty sure that an upgrade to Windows 11 can be reverted and you can go back to Windows 10 if necessary. Still, I would back up any valuable data before experimenting.
On the Linux side of the world, Steam can be installed on Linux and devices such as the Steam Deck exist. Depending on what games you play on your gaming PC, Linux could be an option.
The differences between Windows 10 and Linux are greater than the differences between Windows 10 and Windows 11. In other words, Windows 11 may be a bit better or worse (depending on your opinion) but it isn't majorly better or worse.
Windows 10 will be supported until October of 2024
Because of that I'm planning to get a bigger NVME drive and dual-boot my system on Windows and Linux. I did a full switch for a couple months after the beginning of the year and it went alright.
Oh yeah absolutely the only tinkering I've really needed to do is make sure I installed steam properly (NixOS) and a little bit of jiggery pokery for battle.net games (though battle.net is actually really good, you just give it a path to the game files and away you go)
Never tried mint but weirdly enough NixOS has been the easiest distro for me so far, haven't run into any weird bugs in drivers or my touchpad not working after hibernation etc like I have in Ubuntu based distros
My laptop had a lot of issues with stability while gaming. I tried win10 and the issues were completely gone.... My new desktop came with win11 and has no stability issues 🤯
No <-- The actual post Honestly have experienced quite a bit issues with Windows rather than Windows 10, not to mention the design wise they went with Windows 11… its terrible not to mention several issues that has happened (couple of them not fixed as of yet)
If you use O&O Windows Shut Up and "This is Windows 11" to help with Windows' excessive privacy issues... ehn! Its a fine, stable operating system. I have run into far fewer issues with 11 than I did with 10, honestly.
imo if you have a compatible machine (& prefer the taskbar at the bottom of the screen), then yes. it's essentially just 10 with some kernel/core updates & a new ui that's much better.
OP, thanks for being the sacrificial lamb here. Now I know never to ask a question about Windows if I don't want to hear irrelevant opinions from Linux snobs. Sorry you didn't get a lot of real answers.
Lemmy as a platform is built on FOSS. There are going to be Linux/FOSS advocates all over here.
I say this as primarily a windows admin who recently started diving into Linux.
The "real answer" is that Windows 10 is supported until October 2024. You have until then to make your decision or switch to an alternative because after that, W10 won't be getting more updates and you risk running an unsecure system at that point.
There's a difference between advocating for Linux in its own threads or where especially relevant (no problem!) and every Windows question getting answered with just "use Linux instead!" (aggravating and unhelpful).
I've certainly seen worse than this thread in this regard, however.
Honestly, I completely agree with the sentiment, although in this particular case OP just asked "upgrade to 11 or Linux?" While indicating that they already have some degree of comfort with Linux after having it on a laptop, so the Linux advocates in this thread have a bit of a leg to stand on in this case.
However: when there are questions like "how do I do X in Y software on Z operating system" it's completely valid to be frustrated with the evangelists who come out of the woodwork and say "just use this other OS" because it completely misses the point of the question.
And that goes for Windows, Mac, and Linux evangelists.
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