this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit bordering on addiction (www.theregister.com)
submitted 3 days ago by sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al to c/tech@programming.dev
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[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Windows 11 IoT LTSC is the best answer at the moment. I've had no ads, no AI nonsense, the only setting I've had to change is to restore the sane position of the start menu. Oh also I did use the default options in Rufus which I think disables some annoyances. Despite all the moaning about it, Windows 11 itself is actually a small improvement on Windows 10 so I'm happy to upgrade.

Overall it's is a lot nicer than dealing with Linux's downsides (I have enough of that at work).

I'll stick with this until Microsoft forces my hand.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What downsides?

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 7 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Hardware not working as well. Poor battery life. Worse game compatibility. Worse stability (yeah really). More bugs (yeah really; at this point Windows is quite a bit less buggy than Linux in my experience). More annoying to configure things / set things up usually.

Those are all only on average. Obviously there are times when Windows has bugs or sends you to the command line or fails to connect to WiFi or whatever... But by this point they're pretty rare.

I use Windows and Linux regularly and for Windows my complaints are:

  • If I leave my playstation controller plugged in the PC never sleeps. Took me a while to figure that out! Probably a driver bug.
  • That's actually it. I can't remember the last time the OS crashed.

For Linux:

  • Until I enabled a huge swap file whenever it ran out of physical ram it would hard reboot. This is just Linux's shitty memory management.
  • I recently installed a kernel update and now it hard freezes every week or two. I'm guessing a driver bug. Impossible to debug though.
  • Sometimes when I unplug the laptop while it's sleeping it gets confused and the only thing it responds to is the power button (it does a clean shutdown but that's still annoying).
  • Quite often the login screen freezes for a few seconds when I try to put my password in.
  • It asks me every time I plug my headphones in if they are headphones. Take a hint! Windows never asked that.
  • I set up a network to auto-connect to a VPN, then deleted that VPN. This confused the absolute bejesus out of it so it wouldn't even connect to WiFi. No error messages. Even dmesg only had some vague deauth message. Took me a long time to figure that out!

There's definitely more that I've forgotten.

In fairness this is Linux running on a shitty Dell laptop vs Windows running on a normal desktop. Still...

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What distro are you using?

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

RHEL 8. Unfortunately I don't have a choice about that.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You have no choice about which distro you use at home?

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

They explained pretty clearly that they use Linux exclusively for work.

[–] kittenzrulz123@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago

Its completely reasonable to not like that and I wouldn't blame you for writing off Linux entirely

[–] firelizzard@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago

That does sound unpleasant and I can understand why you prefer Windows. Personally, I rarely have problems with Linux that aren't self inflicted and IMO Windows is an absolute garbage fire of an OS so there's no way I'd ever daily drive it.

[–] polle 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

To be honest, dealing with all the ltsc stuff is way more hassle than just installing linux.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

Really? I found it completely uneventful. The only thing that I needed to learn was that you have to make the installable USB drive using Rufus which I had never heard of (think I last installed Windows about 10 years ago...).